


Dark before Dawn

by DarkTwin



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: ASiP, Anal Sex, Angry Sex, Angst, Angst and Porn, Backstory, Blowjobs, Bottom Sherlock, But with a happy ending, Consent Issues, D/S fantasies, Drugged Sex, Dubious Consent, Dysfunctional Relationship, Episode: s01e01 A Study in Pink, Explicit Sexual Content, Infidelity, M/M, Mindfuck, Oral Sex, POV Greg Lestrade, Porn With Plot, Power Dynamics, Rough Sex, Sherstrade, Top Greg, Topping from the Bottom, Violence, With A Twist, dark dirty and depressing, eventually, handjobs, sex under the influence, unhealthy relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-24
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-03 01:06:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 38,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5270816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkTwin/pseuds/DarkTwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He will never know it, but when John Watson stepped into Sherlock's life, he saved so much more than himself.</p><p>"A Study in Pink" with a twist, but <i>not</i> AU. Sherstrade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a Sherstrade story. If you don't see the attraction of that pairing, and even more so if it makes you uncomfortable, please back off now, and don't let me ruin ASIP for you forever. 
> 
> Please heed the tags, everyone. If you came here because you liked "Everything you need", be warned that this story is not in the same universe. It's a very different and much darker take on the relationship.
> 
> But IF you happen to be wired the same way as I am, and you find yourself enjoying this, your feedback is endlessly appreciated. :)

It starts with a text message.

Never underestimate the destructive powers of a misdirected text message. People have been hurt because of them. People have even been killed because of them. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve investigated their deaths.

How ironic that I should receive one of those myself one day – a text message that I was never meant to see. And how fitting that it should happen the moment I’m looking down at the body of a man who probably sent a good many messages with similar content himself, going by how his stunningly pretty secretary will dissolve in tears on Sally Donovan’s shoulder when she hears how we found him.

I can assure you that there is nothing that shakes up your life as badly as discovering that the person you love (and will always love in spite of everything) is sleeping with someone else. So just in case you want your life shaken up a bit, I'd advise you to always read all text messages from your spouse carefully. Especially the ones you weren’t supposed to get.

But if you’re looking for a way to ruin not only your marriage, but also your reputation, your health, your career, your good relations with your co-workers and your self-esteem along with it, make sure that you read it in front of Sherlock Holmes.

It’s the early evening of the 12th of October, and we’re grouped around the body of a man, curled up on his side on the floor of an empty office building a stone's throw to the north of St. Pancras, fingers bent into claws, empty eyes staring, mouth still grinning in an agony that he can no longer feel.

Our medical examiner is going over the body with gloved hands for a preliminary estimate of the cause and approximate time of death. Sally is next to me with a notepad and pen in her hand. The photographer is already standing by with his camera, waiting for the word to get started. And Sherlock is on the other side of the body, with his hands in the pocket of his coat, tapping his foot impatiently while the medical man takes his time - far too much time, apparently - to announce his verdict.

But everyone’s attention is fixed on the corpse, so nobody looks up when the phone in my pocket pings a text alert, and I take it out and read it.

It pulls the rug out from under me.

_Sorry love, can’t do tomorrow. What about Sat? G’s on duty all weekend. Can't wait. xxx_

For a moment, the tiny letters on the screen blur in front of my eyes, but then they come back into focus with frightening clarity, as if to burn themselves into my brain.

A second later, logic kicks back in. Must be a mistake. Can’t be anything but a silly mistake. Nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with her.

But then, my wife’s number is my wife’s number, no doubt about that. And last time I looked, my name did start with a G. Not to mention that I _will_ be on duty all weekend.

The medical examiner has started talking, reporting his finds (no signs of violence on the body, death by asphyxiation, most likely, but how induced…?). Sally is taking notes. The photographer leans in for a closer look to make sure he gets the shots the doctor wants. And I’m still standing there frozen to the spot, phone in hand, staring at the screen and feeling a distinct sense of nausea rising up in my throat.

Sherlock is watching me.

His eyes are no longer on the body now, but on my face, with that piercing x-ray stare that’s usually so useful but that makes me feel utterly naked and defenceless. When I look across at him almost against my will, as if compelled to meet his gaze, his eyes narrow a little. But he never says a word while the doctor straightens up and steps back to make room for the photographer, and Sally finishes her notes. She turns to me then, and I jerk back to the present.

“Can we -“ she begins in an enterprising tone, and then stops again, because she’s no genius but still a very intelligent woman, and we’ve worked together long enough for her to sense when something’s wrong.

“Yeah, alright,” I manage to get out, sounding like I’ve suddenly developed a bad cold. I slip the phone back into my pocket. “Tell Anderson he can go ahead.”

And then I turn on my heel to walk out of the room, fast, purposefully, driven by an overwhelming sense of rage that’s taking possession of me, now that the initial numbness is wearing off. Rage at her, rage at him-whoever-he-is, rage at myself. Nothing to do with anyone in this room, of course. But I need to be alone right now, _alone_. And I couldn't care less at this moment, I really couldn't, about who or what killed Sir Jeffrey Patterson.

I’m halfway across the open, empty office space when that deep voice that I know only too well speaks up behind my back.

“Adultery, Lestrade.”

I halt in mid-stride, then swivel back round. I can feel my rage latch onto a new target, almost grateful to have someone present, someone tangible, to direct it at. Sherlock is still standing there with his hands in his pockets, like a statue, the perfect picture of unconcern.

“What was that?” Sally asks him in that condescending, slightly annoyed tone that she always adopts when Sherlock speaks in riddles. Except this isn’t a riddle at all, but of course she doesn't know that. How the hell does _he_ know?

“Oh, just a possible motive for his suicide”, Sherlock replies evenly, with a nod at the body on the floor. “It's common enough, you know.” He raises his head and looks directly across at me. "Happens all the time, really."

I can feel my hands clench into fists, but I'm too far away to throw a punch, and anyway, that would just be the equivalent of holding up my phone for everyone to read. And everyone knowing about this is the last thing I need right now.

So all I do is puff out a loud breath, turn, and exit the room without looking back.

\+ + +

It does not start with the text message. It starts a lot earlier.

2009 has been a bad year.

Right from the start, the London underworld has been in a conspiracy to make life especially difficult for us at the Met. Crime is at an all time high in many fields. Terrorist threats, gang violence, human trafficking, drugs - you name it, for some reason this year the rates will have doubled.

There's nothing wrong with my team's clear-up rate – guess why – but the Chief Superintendent, being a Chief Superintendent, is an expert in passing on the pressure he’s under to his subordinates. At the time when the perpetually grey London sky remembers that we're in June and it would be kind of decent to give way to a little sunshine now and again, the Super rewards our very, very decent performance (decent if you look purely at the results, that is) by taking my second sergeant away from my clearly over-staffed team.

My bill for overtime – already impressive – reaches an as yet unknown length. Soon, I'll theoretically be entitled to a whole year off duty, or to a compensatory payment that would mean that new car Cathy wants, straight away. But of course there is no compensation, and constant lack of sleep doesn't make me any more pleasant to live with.

Too little exercise and too much fast food eaten in haste at my desk mean that I'm putting on weight, too, which should really be the least of my problems. But when you're married to a woman for whom that is a mortal sin, even little things like that become an issue.

When my father died last November, Cathy and I were going through a tough time, too. But at least it felt like we did it together. But now, it’s as if she doesn’t even see what the problem is. She trained as a nurse, after all, so she should remember what it’s like to work for an understaffed and underfunded public institution. But all I’m getting now whenever I call her that I’ll be late again is an eye roll that I can _hear_ over the phone. And a cold shoulder turned my way when I finally slip into bed next to her late at night.

We need a break.

But in August, a court schedules several lengthy hearings on a series of armed robberies that we've cleared up earlier in the year. I have to appear as a witness, of course, but nobody seems to have taken into consideration that I and Cathy had been planning to spend those exact same two weeks on the beach in Spain. My first holiday since Christmas last year. Cheers.

We settle for at least a weekend together down at her parents' in Dorset then. But of course Cathy ends up going alone, because that's the weekend when Sally Donovan sprains her ankle (playing volleyball, for Christ's sake, where did she even find the _time_ for that?). Lacking a second sergeant on my team, I have to step in and stay in town.

I console myself that I was actually not looking forward to joining Cathy for her school reunion, that Saturday night. I don’t really know any of her old friends, and there's nothing more tedious than being treated to endless gossip about people you've never met and couldn't care less about. So maybe it's not so bad after all that she goes alone. Will probably be even happier that way, without me tagging along as a dead weight.

Jesus, if I'd known.

She comes back gushing about how nice it was to meet sooo many lovely people again, and how it's amazing that so many of them live in London now. There's Heather, “I'd no idea she's a nurse, too”. There's Amy, who “goes to the same gym as me, how weird that we've never met!”. And there's Martin, the professional athlete-turned-banker who (with a giggle) “I used to have quite a crush on back in school”. Of course she'll be seeing them all more often now. And I, idiot that I am, actually feel relieved and less guilty about ruining both our social lives, whenever she's away for a night out with her old new friends now, and I come home after a fourteen hour shift to an empty, quiet flat.

In September, on top of everything else, Sherlock starts being trouble, too. Well, he's always been trouble, of course, but quite literally never more than he was worth. Or else I'd never have kept involving him in my cases, in spite of my team being less than enthusiastic about it.

He’s never exactly given them any reason to love him, of course. But now, for no reason that we can see, he takes a sudden turn for the worse. Where he was difficult with people before, he starts being downright abrasive. Occasional pinpricks about other people's intellectual abilities become regular, undisguised insults, and social clumsiness turns into a constant stream of deliberate, insufferable affronts. Soon, Sally is the only one who still gives as good as she gets. The rest of us he just leaves speechless.

And every time I see him now, he looks thinner and paler, too. And while he's always been full of restless energy, it's been a long time since I saw him as antsy as that, unable to sit still, keep his hands still, keep his eyes focussed on the face of the people he's speaking with. It stirs up bad, bad memories, I can tell you that.

One night, in a rare quiet moment while the two of us are having a perfectly illicit smoke in the underground car park at NSY, I can't stand it any more, and I ask him what I would see if he'd roll up his sleeves right now.

“My bare forearms,” he replies with a shrug, and takes a long drag from his cigarette.

Did I mention I've started smoking again, after years of abstinence, and in spite of the face Cathy pulls every time we come close enough for her to smell it on my breath? Not that that happens often, lately.

“Bare as in flawless, immaculate and unblemished?” I ask.

“Bare as in naked, Lestrade,” he says, and his pale eyes fix me with one of those disconcerting stares. "Would you like that?"

I swallow (why?), and clear my throat. “Yeah, alright. Just wondering.”

“Wondering that I should suddenly have unlearned the art of hiding injection sites, or what?”

“God, just shut up.”

He smiles.

I'm not satisfied. Trying to watch him closely for any signs of a relapse is not an option, however. We don't meet all that often these days, because while there is no lack of work for us officials, there is little going on at NSY to pique _his_ interest. All common, ordinary, mundane, boring routine work. Crimes committed by idiots and solved by idiots without the slightest need to bother the great Sherlock Holmes with them. Just three times as many as usual.

And if I tried to find a pretext for calling him in more often just to keep an eye on him, he'd see through it straight away.

But I can't rid myself of the feeling – the sickening _worry_ , call it by its name, Greg – that after a couple of years of relative stability, his chosen life is starting to take a toll after all.

He's busy, oh yes. He's got a fairly constant influx of private clients now. Word is getting around that in spite of his absolutely impossible way of dealing with the human aspects of a case, he'll have it solved in no time at all - very often even before you've made it home from that dingy little flat of his on Montague Street that doubles as his office, and sometimes even before you leave.

And whenever he's not sitting at home being obnoxious to the people he depends on for his living, or not running around London investigating God knows what, he's cooped up in that lab at Bart's, absorbed in his experiments and bossing poor Molly Hooper around, who should know better than to let him but who seems defenceless against it. (I'll soon understand why.)

But all that can be no real compensation for that crushing loneliness that has been his constant companion throughout all his adult life. It already defined him even when I met him for the first time, years ago. Even as the pathetic addict that he was back then, he knew how to keep himself aloof and apart. And over the years that I've known him, he's perfected that art even further. He may say that he values nothing as much as his freedom and his independence, but I doubt that he realised that he was actually building himself a prison. A prison with a single cell, for a single prisoner kept in perpetual solitary confinement.

Looking back, what happens now is a prison riot, and it's as ugly as they come.

And yes, _yes_ , the ugliest turn a prison riot can take is always when those in charge of upholding law and order start siding with the rebels – bullied, coerced, bribed, _seduced_ , it doesn’t matter.

If only I'd see that clearly. But I don't.

\+ + +

The rest of the day I get that message that wasn't meant for me – October 12th - is an unmitigated disaster.

I know I’m never good at telling people they’ve lost a loved one, and I’m always happy to let Sally do most of the talking then. But this time, the dead man being the CEO of a well-known accounting firm in the City, and the patron of three dozen charities (something earned him that knighthood, after all), apparently nobody under Inspector is qualified to tell the wife. I’m lucky Sally doesn’t kick me in the shins during that god-awful half an hour in the Pattersons' house. But the only reason she doesn’t do it is because there is a large expanse of glass-topped coffee table separating her feet from my shins, while I stumble through a terrible succession of set phrases meant for the widow but addressed to my teacup, my mind completely elsewhere.

In the car, on our way back to NSY in the growing dark of the early evening, Sally’s silence is deafening. And I know I won't be able to stand any more of that for today, so I drop her off in front of the building, telling her that I’m off home, and the paperwork can wait until tomorrow. She nods, sympathetic, concerned, but clearly also secretly relieved. She doesn't say “drive carefully”, but I can hear her thinking it.

I’m not going home, of course. How can I, knowing what I know? Several hours have passed since I got that message. Cathy will have realised by now that there must be a reason why he-whoever-he-is (Martin the athlete-turned-banker, Greg, call him by his name) hasn’t replied yet. She’ll have checked her „Sent“ folder, and she’ll have realised her mistake. If she’s very, very brave, she’s sitting at home now waiting for me, ready with a hundred explanations. More likely, she’s cleared out, to stay with him, or maybe with one of her female old new friends (whose full names and addresses I don’t even know), unable or unwilling to face me. Either way, _I_ can’t face going home to check which it is.

But when I jump a red light without even noticing, I realise that driving around aimlessly isn’t an option either. That’s when I pull over into the car park of a pub I just happen to be passing, and go inside to have a pint. Or two. Or six.

I’ve never been to this place before. It’s not the sort of place I usually like – a little too posh, a little too polished – but I don’t care. It’s a pub, right? So they must have beer.

I sit at the bar all by myself, pretending to watch the cricket match that’s on the telly ( _cricket_ , Greg, Jesus), drink a few pints, and muse on the nature, effects and dynamics of sexual frustration.

Because that's what it must have been, mustn't it? I mean, I'm not a different person now than I was last year, or twelve years ago when we got married. If we were good for each other then (and we were, we bloody _were_ ), why aren't we good for each other now? It can't just be my hair going grey. It had already started doing that by the time Cathy and I first met, so she knew what to expect. And in fairness, Cathy hasn't been ageing backwards either. But it's really not that, not at all. There hasn't been a single day since I met her when I've not loved her, and not wanted her. Even just thinking now about her now, coming out of the shower, chestnut curls dancing around her smiling brown eyes, tiny drops of water glistening on her tanned skin, all the way down from her shoulders, on her small breasts and her narrow hips, her long firm thighs and...

I hide the flush of blood rising up my face in my glass. The flush of blood that goes to a different place, further below, conveniently escapes notice anyway, hidden under the solid wooden top of the bar I'm sitting at.

It can't just be a question of frequency, either. It's true, we've not had a lot of quiet time to ourselves lately, but that goes both ways, doesn't it? It was often me who was late, of course, or just too tired, I admit that. And then there was the last time, of course, when after a month-long dry spell we were finally right in the middle of it, and my phone rang and there was another black teenager stabbed to death in Deptford who needed taking care of _now_. She wasn't amused at that, no, but it's not like _I'm_ suddenly happy living practically like a monk, either. How does that give _her_ the right to -

I can feel my hand clench around the cool, damp glass, trying to fend off the images that come rushing into my head. Cathy naked and shining in the warm colours of autumn that have always defined her beauty, gold and copper and brown, under another man now. A different pair of hands on her soft skin, a different voice muttering endearments into her ear, a different pair of lips on hers, on her neck, on her bare shoulders, on her breasts, on her -

I let my eyes travel around the room, looking for a distraction. Unfairly, there is none at all.

Over in the part of the pub with the restaurant tables, three of the four that are occupied sport a happy couple each, absorbed in each other, with no eyes for anything else in the world. From the young ones over in the corner, slightly giddy and awkward at what may be their first attempt at a proper dinner date, to the silver-haired seventy-somethings that are actually holding hands while they're eating their dessert, the room is filled with companionship, quiet contentment and happy anticipation of even better things to come, damn them all.

The one single man who sits alone at a table with only a glass of water in front of him – business suit, my age or older, typing away on his phone - could be in the same boat as me, though. But that illusion lasts for all of two more minutes, until the door opens and a young bloke – jeans, spiky hair, horn-rimmed designer glasses, laptop bag over his shoulder – walks in. The way the older man's face lights up immediately when he sees the new arrival tells me the whole story in an instant, and I'm already turning my head away by the time the younger one reaches the table, and leans down for a passionate kiss by way of greeting, tongue and all.

Even the young man behind the bar would probably have no problem finding someone willing tonight, if he were in the mood. I've barely looked at him yet, the way you never really look at the barman, the cabbie or the girl at the supermarket checkout, but he’d be well worth it. Straight, slightly overgrown black hair framing a fine-boned face, dark almond eyes telling of Asian heritage, and an easy, genuine smile for each of his customers and each of their requests. He works quickly and deftly, his hands and his forearms, left bare by his tight-fitting black t-shirt, constantly on the move as he handles glasses, bottles, and spare change. He wears an assortment of wristbands on his right arm – braided from brightly coloured yarns and secured with a frayed knot, the type that twelve year old girls like to make on the bus back home from school and give to their friends as a token of their eternal affection. Touching really, to see those on a grown man. But at any rate he, too, seems to have made his choice, and is happy to wear the proof of it proudly and openly.

I glance at my hand, at the narrow golden band encircling my ring finger. Does that mean I have to take it off now? Does _she_ take it off when –

I run my hand across my face. This isn't getting me anywhere. The alcohol is, though, especially because it’s on an empty stomach. It wouldn’t even have been necessary to switch to Scotch to make me wobbly in the knees and fuzzy in the head, but that does the trick even more quickly than beer. It’s been a while since I last got doggedly, methodically drunk (last year, prolonged and systematic child abuse eventually resulting in a death that social services could easily have foreseen and prevented, don’t ask), but of course I still know how to do it.

The barman gives me a slightly worried look when he hands me the second tumbler. Quite accidentally ( _clumsily_ , Greg) the cold fingers of my hand brush against his warm ones when I receive it from him. He instantly apologises, as if it was his fault, and withdraws his hand quickly. And I resist the sudden urge to slip a finger under those colourful bands and hold him back, and demand of him to tell me the secret of how to bind a human being to another forever, really _forever_ , no matter what.

Ah, time to go. That’s a _man_ , for Christ’s sake. He may have Cathy's boyish figure and the same sweet dark eyes, but really.

Besides, I'm sure I've given Cathy enough time now to arrange alternative accommodation at least for tonight. And whatever's still going on with me out of sight under the bar right now will go away if I just ignore it. I mean, only a moment ago I was still feeling holier than thou about how it matters not that you do it but who you do it with...

When I get up from my seat, the barman politely offers to call a cab for me. But I mumble “thanks, I’m fine”, and manage to make my way to the door without stumbling. I can practically feel his concern accompany me to the door, but I’ll be damned if –

The blast of cold air that hits me when I open the door and step outside blows the rest of that thought away, and I can't be bothered to try and hold on to it. It’s fully dark outside, has been for hours now. The lights of the cars passing by, slicing through the darkness, are painfully bright, and with relief, I turn away from the road and walk around the corner of the building into the quiet car park. At the driver’s door of my car, I fumble with the key - battery of the automatic opener gave out over a week ago, no bloody _time_ to replace it yet, just like I was too busy to notice that _I_ was getting replaced, too – and then I drop it. I stoop to retrieve it, and when I straighten up again, steading myself with a hand against the cold metal of the door, a deep voice speaks up behind my back.

“You sure this is a good idea?”

I flinch – silly, isn’t it, but I really do – and then swivel around to face the owner of that voice. He pushes himself off the wall of the building where he must have been standing in the shadows, watching me, and comes walking towards me, hands in the pockets of his coat, with that nonchalant grace that marks his every movement. It’s so dark here at the back of the pub that I can barely see his face, but both the silhouette and the voice are unmistakable.

I slip the key back into my pocket – like a schoolboy, trying to hide a forbidden cigarette or some other guilty little secret - and straighten up to face him.

He treads silently on the gravel of the car park, like a cat. Or is it just the blood pounding in my ears after groping around on the dark ground, masking all other sound?

“How’s that any of your business?” I snap at him – guilty, definitely. Schoolboy. Blushing now, too. _Christ_.

“Concerned for the welfare of our fellow citizens, Detective Inspector,” he mocks me. “Particularly the road users between here and your house.”

“How - “ No, better not try and get a word like "public-spirited” out in one piece. “How kind of you.”

He smiles, but doesn't reply.

“Come to take me home, then?” I ask him. “Don't tell me you know how to drive.” At least I've never seen him do it.

“I know a whole lot of things that you have no idea of, Lestrade,” he says, and takes another few steps towards me until there's barely room between us. His face is still in shadow.

“Like what?” I ask stupidly.

“But to answer your original question,” he talks over me, “I'd say no, quite the opposite.” He pauses to let me figure that out, but I don’t. “And besides,” he continues smoothly, “I feel it is my duty to keep you from pressing any unwanted attentions on an innocent young man barely half your age."

Dangerously close to being trapped between the car at my back and his body in front, I put out a hand to stop him. "Yeah, talking of unwanted attentions," I rasp, annoyed. “I have no idea why you’re stalking me, but don't bloody _crowd_ me, too!"

He pouts - Jesus, those lips - but he doesn't pull back. On the contrary, he leans forward, against the palm of my outstretched hand, and now I can _feel_ him chuckle through his open coat and the fabric of his scarf and shirt underneath, an ominous, dark and deep sound rising from the depths of his chest. His head comes down next to mine to whisper in my ear, a stray curl of his hair brushing against the side of my face.

“Does it make you uncomfortable?”

I do push him away then, with quite a forceful shove against his chest.

“What d'you think you're doing?”

“Showing you that I know things,” he grins, not abashed in the least.

“You do nothing else all day," I snort.

“And you love it.”

“I don't - “

But I know something, too, and I don't love it a bit. Drunk and slow as I am, I know that he's not himself either right now, because I've never known him to seek physical contact before, neither with me nor anyone else. It's extremely unlike him, and that means there's only one explanation for it.

I reach out with my hand, and put it under his chin, turning his head sideways rather ungently so the light from the street lamps falls onto it. And even in the short moment before he jerks it away again, annoyed, I’ve seen that I was right. His eyes, normally of that curiously pale neither-green-nor-blue colour, look black now for the wide pupils, and in spite of the cold there is a sheen of sweat on his brow.

“You're high,” I tell him, putting a deliberate dose of disgust in my voice.

“Of course,” he confirms, neither surprised nor ashamed in the least. “And you're hard. I fail to see where your moral advantage lies.”

I couldn't have cared less if he'd tried to throw my own inebriation in my teeth, because a bloke's entitled to get drunk, isn't he, when he finds out that his wife is cheating on him? But this I wasn't prepared for. I swear it wasn't even true any more, not until he said it. But _when_ he says it, it's as if my body has only been waiting for permission to go down that road again. With astonishing rapidity, given the level of alcohol in my blood, the self-fulfilling prophecy fulfils itself, and I can feel the bulge in my trousers building up again obediently. What _for_ , damn him?

Oh right, he told me so. He said he was here for the opposite of taking me home, meaning he wants _me_ to take _him_ home, now there's no one waiting there for me any more. It's so absurd, I have to laugh. It comes out as a silly high pitched giggle, half resigned and half desperate. I instantly hate myself for it.

He takes it as encouragement, and before I know it, he's closed the open space between us again. A moment later, I'm engulfed in a sensation of warmth and sheep wool, a whiff of aftershave, a stronger scent of cigarette smoke, and two hands sneaking under my jacket and around my waist on either side, crawling right under my shirt and coming to rest on the bare skin of my lower back. His hair is tickling my cheek again now, too, and then his voice is back, purring contentedly into my ear.

“That's right,” he mutters. “You just keep still and let me. I know what you need.”

 _I need my wife back,_ a little voice whimpers in my head, but now the blood is pounding in my ears again, and it stifles that protest very quickly and efficiently. It's pounding somewhere else, too, and that doesn't get better when the hands on my lower back start moving, and dig themselves under the waistband of my trousers and right inside my pants, cupping me and pulling me closer. He straddles me with his long legs so our hips connect. Or would connect, if there wasn't something else in the way. Not just me, by the way.

The touch, even through several layers of fabric, sends shivers down my spine, and they don't stop, because now he's moving again, rocking against me, a slow grind, up and down, up and down, in the same rhythm as the soothing sing-song in my ear.

“S'alright, s'alright,” he chants, now giving my backside a gentle squeeze every time, too, to keep me close. It would be hypnotic, if it wasn't so good that it'd be a crying shame to fall asleep right now and miss it. My eyes close as if of their own accord, but other than that, I'm wide awake and aware of every tiny sensation down there in my groin as it moves from pleasant and promising anticipation to something more urgent, more immediate wanting.

A little noise escapes me at that point, more like a sob than anything else. Because when was the last time someone took care of me like that? When was the last time someone let their hands wander over my body like that, calming and caressing and yet insistent and pleading at the same time, made short work of my belt and the zip of my trousers, and put their hand just _there_?

Because Christ, that's what he's doing now. I can feel myself twitching in response.

“Sssshhh,” he soothes me. “It's fine. It's fine.”

It's not, actually. I've somehow not started feeling ashamed yet of rutting against another man (and _that_ man, of all) in the darkness of a deserted car park. But even with my judgment severely clouded by too much drink, at least part of my brain is still lucid enough to realise that what we're doing here will mean trouble. _Certain_ trouble if it doesn't pass unnoticed. I raise my hands and put them on his shoulders to tell him so, when he reads my thoughts and does something that drives those considerations completely from my mind. He twists himself out of my grasp, like an eel, slides down and, bloody _hell_ , without further ado pushes my trousers down as far as is necessary and goes down on me as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

_I know what you need._

Holy shit.

I'm having a hard time not exploding then and there from the mere _idea_ of this man squatting down in front of me and taking me into his mouth, but now that it's actually happening, all I can do is keep my eyes squeezed shut and claw at the surface of the car door at my back with both hands, grappling for a hold that isn't there. He's holding on to me all the more firmly, with his own hands on my buttocks again, trapping me between them and his mouth with no way out even if I wanted it, which I don't, God no I don't. Because it's pure glory, the way he licks and sucks like he's getting paid for it. (Where did that thought come from? It makes me go even harder).

I bite my lip, struggling not to make another sound, but he's sensed it, because that's the moment he changes his rhythm to something even quicker, even needier, and with an undignified grunt, I give myself over to the heat shooting through my groin that heralds completion.

But just as I can feel the familiar contraction immediately before release, he literally spits me out. In a quick, smooth movement, he straightens up, careful to take a good step back at the same time, out of the line of fire. It leaves me, slumped helplessly against the car with my trousers hanging around my knees, to shoot off onto the ground between us with a curse, too far gone to stop it. Fucking _hell_.

“Don’t take it personally,” he smirks when it’s over. “I don't like the taste, that's all. Oh, and - “ He digs a hand into the pocket of his coat, and takes out my (my!) car key. “I don't like people driving under the influence either, so make sure you get a cab now.” He tosses the key into the air and catches it again with a grin, then slips it back into his pocket, turns and walks off without another word.

And all that’s left to me is to face the humiliation of cleaning myself up at least half-way with shaking hands, and then going back inside to ask Almond Eyes to call me a cab after all. The fact that the elderly couple from the pub pass me with a friendly greeting on the way to their own car when I'm not even half zipped up again isn't helping either.

\+ + +


	2. Chapter 2

The next morning, when I pass the reception desk at NSY with a nodded good morning, like every day (except an hour later, and not only because I had to take the tube to work), the sergeant on duty waves me over to him. He produces a padded envelope from his desk, the type that bike couriers deliver their goods in, and hands it to me with a smile. Through the padding, I can feel the outline of my car key.

Now it’s my turn to make a terrible mistake, and I make it without a second thought. I should have known better than to walk into the trap, but I do, and I’m not even sorry.

In the lift, I take out my phone and send off a text message.

_You know you have something to make up for, don't you?_

The reply is there even before I reach my office.

_What? I told you it was suicide. End of story. SH_

_I'm not talking about Sir J._

_Oh? What are we talking about then? SH_

_Not going to put that in a text message._

_In case you end up sending it to your wife instead of me? SH_

_Fuck you._

_See, that wasn't so difficult. SH_

_I'll find you. SH_

\+ + +

In the more than two decades that I’ve worked for the Met, I’ve come across so many addicts - addicts to practically everything that you can get addicted to, from alcohol to illegal drugs, pills, gambling, and internet porn - that I thought I understood the mechanics of addiction fairly well, and that I’d be immune to it because I knew what to watch out for.

But it doesn’t save me this time.

Like so many addictions, it starts as a game. A game that we play exclusively by his rules, but that feels worth it every time. Every night, over the next week, I stop on my way home to get drunk somewhere I don't usually go, and he finds me. Always before I'm too drunk to get us both home in one piece. Sometimes even before I've finished my first drink. One day, even before I've managed to order it. And home we go then, stumble up the stairs, and then fall over each other as soon as the door closes behind us.

There's nobody there to stop us or ask us why. Cathy _is_ gone. She'd texted me, on the day after, that she realised she'd made a mistake and that she was sorry if (“if”! would you believe that!) she hurt me. But she’d need time to work out what should happen now. She’d be in touch. She's also picked up some of her things (just clothes and practical stuff, nothing personal with any sentimental value yet, at least) while I was at work. Since then, silence.

So in the meantime, we play.

We never do anything you could call flirting, or courting. We meet for a single purpose, and we don’t bother pretending that it has anything to do with dating or relationships or, God forbid, love. We’re both just letting off steam, or so I tell myself.

I don’t realise yet that we’re in fact just clinging to each other like two drowning men in a cold, endless ocean, floating along aimlessly with not even a piece of wreckage to hold on to, and too far gone to care whether we'll end by dragging each other down to the bottom of the sea.

Because for some reason, he makes even drowning feel like pure bliss.

Number one of his rules is that I get off. Every time. He has no time to waste on social niceties even when he’s having sex, as he demonstrated on that first night, but he never disappoints in that way. He gets me there, and to be fair, on the nights that follow, he gets me there in ways that definitely make up for leaving me hanging in the air, that first time. More than.

I’m not drunk any more – not technically, at any rate - so I’ve remembered that it’s a bad, bad idea indeed to have unprotected sex with a former intravenous drug user. The nice side effect is that with adequate protection, the question whether or not the taste is appealing ceases to matter.

Another of his rules is that we never undress further than absolutely necessary. I’d love to - I’d love to peel off layer after layer of those posh clothes until there’s nothing left to cover his pale skin. But he doesn’t allow it. Then again, I suppose most of the times I wouldn’t even last long enough to get him out of all that fabric.

Because another rule is that it’s always happening fast, never mind awkward fumbling.

And another is that he’s never sober.

That bothers me, though. And one night, while he’s on his back on the floor in the hall of my flat getting rug burns on his bum from my weight on top of him, I pause long enough to ask him why.

I mean, I know why. He’d never let himself go like this without chemical enhancement. But it is disquieting. On dope, he was a wreck, and I wouldn’t for the world wish those days back. But as opiates will, at least they thoroughly killed this particular urge. Now, on coke, he’s a nightmare. A nightmare of need and want and pulling-at-your-clothes and humping-your-hip/thigh/backside and coming-all-over-your-hand the moment you close it around him, thinking you could reign him in a bit that way.

Because he doesn’t just provide _me_ with a good time. Why would he, anyway? He needs it as much as I do, or more. But still. My moral compass seems to be badly in need of recalibration lately, but the drugs do worry me. Technically, he might not even be considered fit to give or deny consent in that state, and what would that make _me_?

Sweet, isn’t it, how I’m still worrying about such things at this point?

“It’s not even your preferred substance,” I say to him, pushing myself up on my hands to get a look at his face. “What happened?”

He responds by arching his back in one of those mouth-watering demonstrations of how flexible his lean body is, and presses his groin against mine, forcefully enough to make me gasp. “It’s not even your preferred gender,” he grins. “What happened?”

I don’t ask him again.

He has the decency to never take any of the stuff while I’m around. He carefully times his shots so we catch the best part of the high together, and we’re finished before the comedown begins. I never witness that either, because he never stays. He’s always gone even before I can find the energy to pick myself up and clean up the mess and get myself to bed. But the idea of him staying over for a spell of post-climactic cuddling is absurd anyway, even if there was a chance of not having it spoiled by the effects of withdrawal.

That’s another of those early rules, by the way. I take him home, but I don’t take him to bed. Whether that’s a residue of decency on my part - it’s still a marital bed, after all - or just a practical consideration, I’m never sure. Because just like with the undressing, most of the times, we wouldn’t even get that far.

I've banned him from trying anything funny while we're still in the car, after I've almost made one of those trips end against one of the concrete pillars in the underpass under the motorway, not five minutes from my house. If you'd told me, only a couple of weeks ago, that I'd end my life with another man's hand around my cock, I'd have called you crazy. But when it almost happens, all I can think is “but please not yet”.

But while I may have gone crazy in other ways lately, I have not developed a death wish. Because who would when, after months of nothing doing, you can have mind-blowing sex every night of the week?

So once we're up the stairs to my flat - and sometimes that's enough of a challenge. I've found out how good it feels to make him walk up in front of me with my hand between his legs from behind, cupping the bulge in his trousers and feeling every move as he ascends the steps. The first time I tried that, it drove him so to distraction that he ended up on his hands and knees right there on the stairs, with me palming him vigorously through his clothes and pushing against him from behind for good measure, too, until we both came in our pants and all that saved us from getting arrested for indecent behaviour was that my neighbours happened to be out.

Where was I?

Once we're up the stairs, right. Once we're up the stairs and the door closes behind us, the last inhibitions go flying out of the window.

There’s never any need to negotiate or discuss anything - we just do what feels right, and he for one never runs out of ideas. By the end of a week, we’ve tried every possible variation on the theme of two blokes jerking each other off that involves hands and mouths. And I admit that there were a lot of things that I didn’t know.

I discover that I love it when I’m with my back against the wall and he’s straddling me, pumping against me with his hips while he licks his way along the side of my neck and up to that sensitive spot behind the ear, his hands pulling at the short hair on the back of my head so hard that it almost hurts while he suckles on that part of my skin with perverse tenderness until it drives me over the edge.

I discover that I love it when he’s on his back and he props up his long legs and lets them fall open, while I crawl on top of him and take us both in hand simultaneously. I love running and rubbing my fingers along our joint lengths until we’re both slick with anticipation, and teasing us both to a shuddering climax, soiling each other's bodies until we can no longer tell what came from where, and who went first and who came after.

And I discover that it's beginning to take a toll on every other aspect of my life. On my work, more precisely, because what else is there in my life now?

It started on that first morning after, when I was an hour late to work. What's an hour? Nothing. But it got Anderson miffed, it got Sally worried, and it started the sort of covert scrutiny that's both highly unpleasant and highly inconvenient if you want to hide that you've got addicted to having sex with someone else than your wife.

And it doesn't stop there. Soon, I'm having trouble focussing on my work even when I've finally made it there. Sure, Cathy and I have had our ups and downs before, especially early on, when we were still hoping for children and she had one miscarriage after the other. And as I said, last year, watching my dad die from a particularly nasty variety of stomach cancer wasn't exactly a picnic either. But I've always prided myself on not letting these things affect my output at work. On the contrary, keeping going at work has always been helpful in times of crisis.

But now? Now I catch myself staring at the computer screen, at the blank spaces on the query page of the database. I can't even remember what I meant to look up, because I'm too busy trying to mentally recreate the sensation of trapping someone with my mouth last night, my hands on his firm round buttocks, literally squeezing him dry while he was biting his lips trying not to howl with pleasure.

“Greg?” Sally says at that moment, walking up to my desk with a file in her hand, and thank God I _am_ at my desk, my body invisible to her eyes from the waist down. “You alright?”

It's the first time she's asked me outright, five days after Sir Jeffrey ended his life and Cathy ended everything else. She’s being kind, I know that. But all she gets for her efforts is a harsh request to mind her own business.

When I get up from my desk that night to leave, she’s still there, and I know she’s catching up on the database researches that I was supposed to do this afternoon. I got not even half of those done, daydreaming and even sneaking off to the toilet once for you can imagine what, when I couldn’t bear waiting any more. ( _Twice_ , Greg. Don’t start lying now, too.) (Although the second time doesn’t count when it’s too soon and you can’t go again anyway, does it?)

When I skip our usual after-work pint at the pub on Friday - because _he_ would dare, but _I'll_ be damned if I let him pick me up there, in front of everyone - she asks me again, but not all that sympathetically any more. She’s no fool.

“I’m fine,” I snap.

She crosses her arms and just gives me a look, the look with that “don't give me any bullshit” glint in her eyes that's made even hardened criminals cower.

Anderson's only reaction, when he asks me whether I'm coming and I decline, is a shrug, as if he's already given up on me.

\+ + +

I take all of that out on Sherlock that night, as guess what? He _loves_ it, damn him to hell.

He lets out a surprised little “oof!” – quite adorable, really – when I grab him by the lapels of his fine suit jacket and slam him into the wall of the hallway, kicking the door to my flat shut behind us. He squirms when I pull his shirt out of his trousers, slide my hands under it up to his chest and pinch him, hard, where he’ll feel it most, both sides at once. He squeezes his eyes shut and bares his teeth in a grimace that’s half protest and half ecstasy, and when I move on to twisting, he arches into it so forcefully that he bumps the back of his head against the wall behind him. Almost regretfully, I let go with one hand and sneak it down his trousers, and Jesus, he’s already rock-hard.

“Like that, do you?” I growl into his ear, thrilled at how he seems to yield to the rough treatment. I drag my open palm along his underside, from the base up, eager to create friction rather than smoothing things along, and he gives a shudder, and a moan to go with it that sends a jet of fire right down to my own groin. A moment later, we’re both on the floor, his trousers and his pants are down, and he’s getting all the friction he could ever want from my still fully clothed body grinding itself against his nakedness, while I’m digging my hands into the muscles of his back hard enough to bruise, and working his nipples to a burning dark red with my teeth. For the first time, he comes distinctly before I do, in short, desperate, jerky spurts all over the front of my trousers, teeth still clenched and panting.

And somehow, that changes a balance that I didn't know existed in this – this arrangement between us, or whatever it is. He’s been calling the tune so far, unquestioned, like he always does. But now look at what happens when you don’t let him. It opens up endless new possibilities, and I can barely breathe when they start materialising in my overwrought imagination.

I've still got my hand around him - I was trying to keep him back to make it last longer, to no avail - and he’s coated my fingers, warm and sticky. Now something in my central nervous system (I don't want to believe this has anything to do with my brain) makes my hand take a little detour before returning home to attend to the still unfinished business there. I'm kneeling between his propped-up legs, perfectly positioned for a little exploration, and that's what I embark on now.

“One of these days, princess,” I mutter into his ear, “I’m gonna fuck you for real.”

A single slick finger is already toying with the very place, like my mind has started toying with the idea, now that suddenly everything seems possible.

I can feel him tense in response. He puts his arms around my neck and pulls me down hard, trapping my head so close to his that I can feel his warm breath on the side of my face.

“Don’t do that,” he says, low but distinctly.

I merely grin. “Or what?”

A little inward push, meant as a foretaste, just the tip, just a test - and the fingers on the back of my neck tighten abruptly, his head comes up, and then jets of white hot pain explode all along the side of my throat, outward from the spot that will still show his teeth marks a week later. The shock is so great that my whole body jerks with it. I let go of him and sit back ungracefully, clutching the throbbing spot on my neck in a fruitless attempt to contain the pain, tears filling my eyes.

“You fucking _vampire_!”

He snorts. “Warned you.”

There is no point in carrying on after this, of course. That little stunt killed all my excitement, and it also killed the illusion that he’d ever do that, that he’d ever let himself go entirely, that he’d ever allow someone else to be in control.

It should teach me a lesson, but all it does is spur me on.

\+ + +

The next night, I send him a text just before getting into the car after work.

_Tired of playing hide and seek. Meet me at home._

And it works. No more detours to unfamiliar pubs. He’s there by the time I arrive, leaning against the area railing outside my house, smoking. He grins briefly when he sees the scarf I’ve tied high around my neck, although it’s quite mild outside for late October. Then he grinds the butt under his heel, and follows me inside, like a good little dog on a leash.

I have a moment of indecision when the door closes behind us, but then I walk ahead through the hall and into my and Cathy’s bedroom. He stops in the open door, eyebrows raised.

“Purely technical considerations,” I inform him. After all, I’ve spent a good part of the afternoon at my desk at NSY researching the mechanics of this on the internet. So I know that a somewhat softer base than the carpet in the hall will facilitate things, as will a selection of pillows and cushions for support.

I’d left the last browser window open, by the way, when I went to get myself a coffee. When I returned to my office, I found Sally Donovan sitting in the visitor’s chair to ask for instructions on something or other that had very little to do with shagging another man. I can still feel the blush that rose up my face at that, even though my brain told me that she was entirely at the wrong angle to see what was on the screen. She noticed _that_ , though, right enough.

He sprawls on the bed now as if it’s his own and has always been, and I hate him, and I hate myself, for letting this happen, and that translates into the fastest erection I’ve ever achieved entirely without physical contact of any sort. And he’s not far behind me, already flushed and breathing a little harder than usual, too, by the time he’s kicked off his shoes and I’ve yanked down his trousers and his pants and dropped them on the floor. He stretches luxuriously, like a cat, when I come crawling on top of him, between his long bare legs.

“Left pocket,” he instructs me in an almost bored voice, as if this is a completely routine undertaking for both of us.

“Wrong. Right pocket,” I reply with an unholy sense of petty satisfaction, and dig the small bottle I got from Boots during my lunch break out of my own jacket. But he only smiles appreciatively, grabs one of the pillows and shoves it under his bottom, tilting his hips upwards.

This is not what flashed through my mind when we were together yesterday evening, and what I’ve been daydreaming about all day today. I was picturing it hard and fast and relentless, not slow and comfortable and well-organised. And I was most definitely not picturing him to be in charge of the operation. But then, I think as I can feel the blood pound through the bruise on the side of my neck, he made it eminently clear that he has to be, or it isn’t happening.

“Right.” I flick the bottle open. “Keep your teeth off me this time? Or do I need to put a muzzle on you?”

“Wouldn’t have said you were into that sort of thing,” he grins.

“Wouldn’t have said you were into _that_ sort of thing,” I reply, and although every last gay sex advice website I’ve been on today said “take it slowly”, only a moment later I’m already buried knuckle deep inside him.

“Christ,” he gasps, voicing my own thoughts, and for a while, that’s all we’re capable of, either of us. I can see him swallow. The muscles of his neck are working as he’s struggling to breathe calmly and relax around me, trying but failing to feign unconcern at what I've just done. And for a moment, it’s as if I’ve broken through a wall, cracked that imperturbable façade, shattered the glass, and it’s intoxicating. For a few seconds, I can see what would happen if he ever truly relinquished control. That sudden widening of his eyes, a sudden tightening of every sinew in his body, the sudden break in the rhythm of his breath. God, he’s beautiful when he lets go.

But then he puts his hand over mine to steady it, and starts rocking his hips against me, and he’s won, at least for the moment. And, well, I’m not complaining. Far from it, in fact. I stare down at my glistening finger slipping half-way out of him and deep inside again, in and out, in and out, and my mouth goes dry at the sight. It’s easily the filthiest but also the most enticing thing I’ve ever done in bed, to anyone.

I lose myself in just looking at it, just looking, and feeling myself respond, tighter and tighter until I’m almost aching with need.

“That the best you can do?” he mutters after a while, and now it’s my turn to grin. I try to work in finger number two, and holy shit, this time it’s like he’s opening up around it like a flower. Where did he bloody learn that?

“Better,” he comments drily. “Now - “

“Now you just shut up and let me,” I make a new attempt at gaining the upper hand again, and lean down to lick a long stripe along his own straining hardness. He’s not even covered up yet, but it seems to matter very little right now.

He inhales sharply, and his free hand makes a grab for my hair. He digs his fingers into it as if to push me away. For a moment, things hang in the balance, in a silent struggle. Then I manage to twist out of his grasp, and go down on him again. I take him fully into my mouth and let him feel my teeth, an ever so slight warning not to push me away now if he doesn’t want to be the one that ends up with a bite wound today. He moans, making that sound that always sends a warm shudder up and down my own spine, and I hollow my cheeks and let him have more of that pressure that he loves so much. His hips buck up against me and remind me that I’m trying to multi-task. Remembering the advice from the websites, I twist my fingers ever so slightly, carefully turning them this way and that in their impossibly tight sheath. He rewards me with a noise that I’ve never heard from him before, pure need, and I twitch in response.

The knowledge that I’m the one who’s doing this to him makes me feel light-headed, almost drunk. I can’t see his face like this, but I can feel that he’s close to it again, close to that wide-eyed look of surprised surrender that I got a glimpse of before and that I want to see again, that I always want to see now when I’m in bed with him.

I’m about to unzip and shove my own trousers down with my free hand when the phone in my pocket rings.

We both freeze. Then his hold on my hand that’s lodged inside him tightens.

“Ignore it,” he mutters.

I open my mouth, and release him.

“I can’t,” I say. “I’m on call.”

I may have become an expert at working-but-not-really-working lately whenever I’ve been at my desk, waiting for the evening to come, but ignoring a night time emergency that’s my responsibility to handle is not on.

Regretfully, I take out the still ringing phone with my clean hand. He still doesn’t let me remove the other from its place.

The call comes from an undisclosed number. When I take it, there's a silence at the other end of the line. Then, very hesitantly, a voice that I know only too well speaks up.

“Greg?”

_Cathy._

Holy shit.

“Yes?” I grate, then clear my throat because my voice seems to be gone. Sherlock is watching me.

“I - I’m using Heather’s phone,” she says quickly, her voice tight with nervousness. “I’m staying with her, and I was worried that - that you might not pick it up if you saw it was me. Listen - “ She’s speaking even faster now, as if to get it all out before I hang up on her. “Listen, I’m - Heather says I need to talk to you, and I think she’s right, but somehow I haven't - are you still there?”

Of course I’m still here. Crouched on our marriage bed with a gorgeous man under me and my fingers buried deep in his arse, trying to make him come into my hungry mouth and then fuck him through the mattress afterwards, using all the concentrated rage and fury that _you_ caused me, Cathy, to fuel that shameless, reckless lust that I feel for him and that I've never felt for you.

On a sudden impulse, I jerk my hand out of him and out of his grasp rather ungently. He lets his head fall back against the pillows and rolls his eyes at the ceiling.

“Yeah, still here,” I say tersely into the phone, and turn away from him to perch on the edge of the bed.

“I need more time, Greg.” There’s a pleading note in her voice now. “Just a bit more time. Til the end of the month? That alright? We’ll talk at the end of the month?”

Nine more days.

She makes a little strangled sound at my silence, probably misinterpreting it as disapproval, and I realise that she’s crying. Good God.

“I - I’m not seeing him at the moment,” she says, and sniffs audibly. “And I won’t be seeing him til we’ve talked, I swear. I’ll be in touch, alright?” Another sob escapes her, but she doesn’t end the call. The sound of her laboured breathing is overloud in my ear as she waits for my response.

“Alright,” I finally manage to force out.

“Thank you,” she whispers, and then she does hang up.

I let the phone sink down, and suddenly all I feel is disgust, disgust at myself, disgust at her, and most of all disgust at the man that I’ve let usurp her place in my bed, who doesn’t belong here, who doesn’t want me for who I am but only for what I do.

“She’s lying,” Sherlock breaks in on my thoughts.

I raise my head to look at him.

“What?”

“She’s lying.”

“You didn't even hear what she said.”

“It doesn’t matter what she said. She was telling you a pack of lies.”

“She was bloody _crying_.”

“Breathlessness, constricted voice, verbal incoherence - how can you be sure it was crying, and not just her being in bed with someone else’s fingers right inside _her_?”

I can’t help myself. I slap my soiled hand across his smug face, so hard and so viciously that it leaves an instant, burning red mark on his pale skin.

“Get out. Get out of here now.”

He’s made no sound, and he makes none now. Just gathers his legs under him and rises from the bed, picks up his discarded clothes, and leaves the room, closing the door behind him, not even giving me the satisfaction of slamming it angrily.

\+ + +

 


	3. Chapter 3

I sleep very little that night. It’s amazing how having regular, vigorous sex has taken care of that problem so far, and how used I’ve got to sleeping like a log when I really shouldn’t have been able to. Now everything catches up with me - all the jumbled thoughts that turn and turn in circles with no way out, all the anger, all the disappointment, but also all the self-reproach, all the regret at having failed to fix things before it was too late.

Strangely enough, on Sunday morning I wake refreshed, although I can’t have had more than three hours of sleep. It’s a rare free day, so I go for a swim, which I haven’t done in ages. It feels good, forging ahead through the clear water of our local pool with all the strength I’m capable of. I manage to do a bit over a mile, then I climb out with strained and shaking limbs but feeling like I've just been reborn. As I’m towelling myself dry, I make a decision.

It is a different Greg Lestrade that arrives at work on Monday, dead on time, and comes walking up to Sally Donovan’s desk first thing, even before he enters his own office. She barely glances up at him, expecting to see last week’s glassy-eyed zombie that once was her boss, and reaches for whatever paperwork he's let pile up and that she’s probably spent the whole Sunday fixing for him.

Then she looks at me properly, and freezes. I wouldn’t have thought that the change was so clearly perceptible, but it must be, because then, one corner of her mouth goes up in a tentative smile.

“Alright?” she asks, not quite believing what she’s seeing.

“No,” I reply truthfully. “But I will be, eventually.”

I try to smile back at her. It doesn’t quite work yet, but I try.

She relaxes. “Still running on your first coffee this morning?” she asks conversationally. “Because I am, and I’m badly in need of refuelling.”

Over coffee – proper coffee in the shop around the corner, not the sad wash from the machine on our floor – I tell her no lies and half the truth. All about me and Cathy, but nothing about me and Sherlock. Why? Because I'm a coward and a selfish bastard, who doesn't want that kind look on her face - brows knotted in concern and sympathy - to disappear, and to be replaced by revulsion and disgust. I know what she thinks about me involving him in our cases. What will she say when she finds out that I've been using him as a fucktoy, to pay my cheating wife back in kind?

I guess I'm lucky that she doesn't comment on the bite mark on the side of my neck, clearly visible now – as I realise belatedly – that I've taken off my scarf and jacket in the stuffy, overheated air of the café. She could teach master classes in discretion and loyalty, she really could.

When I've finished the half of the story that I'm willing to disclose – and that I'm fiercely hoping is enough to explain my lapses of the past week - she smiles encouragingly, and raises her paper cup to me in a toast. “To Day Number Nine, then?”

I still don't quite feel like it, but now I do smile back.

I'm a model of zeal and commitment to my job for the whole week that follows. Look at me, what a good person I am, waiting patiently for my wife to make up her mind whether I'm allowed to forgive her. And as if that isn't enough in terms of sainthood, I'm also giving an on-and-off drug addict the chance to break out of a vicious circle, aren't I? Because if it was me who was feeding his addiction last week, by giving him an excuse to burn a little more of his heart out every night, then everything must be alright again now with him, too, mustn't it?

But at any rate, that's over now. Without a single word of explanation, I stop telling him to come and see me, and he stops coming after me of his own accord. As if we've fallen out of each other's lives. And it's all good. I don't miss him, and he doesn't seem to miss me. If I wanted any proof that I never mattered to him as a person, I have it now. I was never more than a provider of entertainment to him, of dead bodies and riddles. And then, when the corpses and the puzzles weren't enough any more, all I became was a completely random, interchangeable entity with a cock that just happened to be available for the purpose of his pleasure.

But still, on the evening of Day Eight, I'm sitting at my desk staring out of the window into the darkness outside, and I'm thinking of him. Not of what we've done lately, but of the time before. The time when his brain was the only part of his body that I was interested in. The time that is irrevocably over now, too. Because how will we ever go back now to what we had before? To that wonderful, endlessly useful, perfectly irregular but unbeatably effective arrangement between us that helped keep our city that we both love safe, and him out of trouble?

Of course I didn't think about that when I started letting him mess with me, that first night outside the pub. And whenever the question came up later, I pushed it right to the very back of my mind. But now it's returning, and I have no answer.

Maybe we could do it like Cathy and I soon will? Meet, talk, sort it out, move on? I have no reason to be sure that everything _will_ sort itself out between Cathy and me, of course. I have nothing to go on, nothing that points towards what she's got planned, whether she'll have good news for me or bad, tomorrow, on the last day of the month. But hope springs eternal, as they say, and I can feel a fresh rush of it flood my body right now, when my phone pings a new text alert.

I take it out with shaking hands, because of course that _must_ be Cathy, to make arrangements for Day Nine.

It is a rendezvous, but it's not from her.

_Marc Antoine, Wardour St. Now. SH_

What, really? Meet, talk, sort it out, move on, with _him_? But maybe he means it. Looking at it soberly, he must find our week of drink- and drug-fuelled sex as disturbing as I do. Or maybe he could just do with a proper meal. Same here, by the way.

 _Oh, dinner dates now?_ I text back, not to make it too easy for him.

_Precisely. SH_

\+ + +

The _Marc Antoine_ is a small French restaurant halfway down Wardour Street, with a front of brightly lit large windows and little tables ranged along them inside. I approach it from the other side of the street, having parked the car a couple of blocks away. I stop outside an unlit and closed hairdresser's and look across, trying to make out whether he's already there. Then I spot them.

Oh, this is a dinner date alright, candlelight and all. Except it’s not me who’s invited.

They've taken the last table on the left, and they sit facing each other, he – taller than me, broader in the shoulders than me, less grey than me - sprawling comfortably in his ridiculously fragile little chair, she leaning towards him with her forearms on the table. I can see her radiant smile, a glint of teeth in her carefully made-up face, and he laughs in response, heartily and unrestrained, his blonde head thrown back. He abandons his easy pose then, and moves back towards her, reaching out and taking her small hand into his big one.

Something in the pit of my stomach ties itself into a hard knot.

Just at that moment, a waiter arrives and hands him the bill, and the next few minutes are dedicated to technicalities, until they emerge from the restaurant into the cold night air outside with their coats on. I've retreated into the door opening of the hairdresser's to avoid being seen, but they're far too engrossed in each other anyway to notice anyone hanging around. He waits for her to finish tying her scarf, then puts his arm protectively – possessively – around her shoulders. She leans into his embrace, and as they turn, away from me towards the other end of the street, she tilts her face up at him and they kiss deeply before they start moving away. I, rooted to the spot until now, almost automatically start moving, too. I have no plan – my brain seems to have short-circuited – but I know that if I let her walk away now, she'll have walked out of my life once and for all. And I can't let that happen. At least not without a fight. My hands clench into fists.

“You sure that is a good idea?”

Am I surprised to hear that voice again, right here and right now? I wish I was.

He materialises at my side, and joins me in looking after my departing wife and her lover, with his hands in the pockets of his coat. "I told you she was lying."

He makes no attempt, verbal or physical, to keep me from running after them, but I stay where I am, as if on command.

He's right on both counts, of course he is. She _was_ lying when she said she was no longer seeing him. And an open confrontation right now will do nothing, absolutely nothing, to repair what's broken. But I hate it, I hate it how helpless it makes me feel. There she goes, slipping away from my grasp, needing nothing from me and owing me nothing either. Eleven years, deleted from our lives as if they never happened.

When Cathy and her new man are about to turn the corner, the grating of a cigarette lighter jerks me out of my miserable little reverie. He hands me the fag he's just lit and then lights another for himself. For a while, we just stand there at the kerb, smoking.

„Come on,“ he says then, and without waiting for my response, he turns the other way and starts walking, a few yards down the pavement and then into a narrow, unlit alley between two houses that I didn't even notice when I came here. I follow, like a good little dog on a leash.

„My car's on Poland street,“ I say to his back when we're threading our way through the darkness. It's not meant as an invitation – I just want to make sure he's not taking any unnecessary detours. I should know him better than that.

„I know,“ he says over his shoulder. „This is a shortcut.“

As it turns out, it is. Though not the sort I was thinking.

A moment later, the alley broadens, and we come to a halt in the backyard of one of the properties on Berwick Street. Another restaurant, by the look of it. Clinical bright light behind a back window, but the people at work in the kitchen there are no more than shadowy outlines on the other side of the milky glass. An occasional banging and clattering inside, shouted orders, short snatches of laughter, a curse. Here outside, all is quiet.

A cat comes slinking round the corner, maybe hoping for some fresh scraps of food in the large skip directly on our right, placed against a brick wall. Next to the skip, there's a low stack of disused, torn and flattened cardboard boxes that once held the restaurant's supplies, waiting to be collected for recycling. Using it as a convenient step, the cat climbs up to the skip and pokes its nose right into the open gap.

Sherlock and I watch it, I with my nose wrinkling, he with detached interest.

"I don't remember asking you to monitor my wife's extramarital activities,“ I say at length. The cat is worrying at something that I'm glad it is too dark to identify.

He shrugs. "Isn't that what private detectives do for a living?"

"What, are you expecting a reward?"

He shoots me a quick look from under long dark lashes at that, then takes another drag at his cigarette. "The truth has always been its own reward, hasn't it?"

I snort derisively. 

He looks at me with narrowed eyes. “Would you really have preferred not knowing?”

The light from the kitchen window casts a blueish shimmer over his pale face, accentuating the dark smudges under his eyes. Looks like he's been finding it hard to go to sleep at night, too, in our new, reformed life of abstinence. Why did we even bother, I wonder?

"You know what?" I tell him. "I think I _have_ a reward for you." He raises his eyebrows questioningly. "Oh, you'll like it. You like nothing better, as a matter of fact."

"What is it?“

"I'll do exactly what you told me to do."

"Which is what?"

"I'll just ignore it.'"

And with that, I place a hand at the back of his neck and pull him towards me, crushing our lips together in the closest we ever come to a kiss.

I forget that he's a wild animal that bites when it feels cornered, and I pay for that with a lip bitten almost bloody, but I don't let go, pushing my tongue into his warm mouth again and again, hungry and demanding, my fingers twisted into his hair at the back of his head. The ends of our cigarettes drop down and roll away. When I come up for air, he's grinning. I grab the front of his coat, swing him round and then trip him backwards with my heel hooked behind his knee. He lands neatly on the cardboard stack, pulling me down with him as he falls.

“I thought your car was on Poland Street,” he protests half-heartedly.

“More room here,” I grate, already hard at work getting his trousers down.

“And no time to waste,” he scoffs, and reaches down as if to put his hand on the already very tangible proof of that statement inside my own trousers. „Missed me that much, have you?“

I push his far too inquisitive hand away. A moment later, my other one is already down the front of his own open trousers, testing his response. And of course it's there, like it’s always been. He's a consummate actor and he can fool anyone, including me, about everything else, but this is something nobody can fake, not even he.

A single week has been enough to condition my brain – and the rest of my body – into doing what it does now. The brain shuts down, the body takes over, and we're right in the middle of it again, and to hell with the good intentions. If she can do it, then so can I.

I push his trousers and his pants down to his ankles, and then twist myself into the gap between his legs. It's anything but elegant, and not even comfortable, but it's efficient. I shove him further along the cardboard stack, until he's flat on his back with his legs up and around me. For good measure, I push his shirt up to his chest, too, exposing his pale skin as far as is possible without undressing properly. I can see him shudder from the cold air, and twitch in anticipation of what's to come.

“Left pocket,” he mutters, his breath already coming in short, urgent gasps again. And this time, I'm happy to let him provide the necessary equipment. Because of course, unlike him, I didn't come here prepared for every eventuality. _I_ was still ready to believe the best of every man and woman, only a quarter of an hour ago.

I find what we need, and cover myself up quickly, then flick the bottle open.

“Only you,” he says when he hears it, and for a second, it sounds like a declaration of love rather than a piece of technical instruction, but then I remember that this isn't about love or anything like it, and as instructed, I hastily slick myself up and then – then the world around me explodes in a sensation unlike anything I've ever felt before. He's ready for me – he's _made_ himself ready for me, and when and where and how did he do that? - but I'm not ready for him, not in the least. Playing with him with my fingers was one thing, but digging right into that still incredibly tight channel, inch by inch into that bottomless heat, is another thing entirely. He tilts his hips to give me better access, and it's a good thing that he's holding me up with both his hands on my shoulders, because I'm losing myself in him and it makes me go weak at the knees.

It's over before it's really started, the pressure too much, the friction too great. My orgasm overtakes me before I realise it, and with a curse, I shoot off like a horny teenager, way before the time, hopelessly out of control, half in and half out of him and with no consideration whatsoever for his own needs.

When I'm spent, breathing hard and still swearing, he laughs quietly.

“Oh, we've got to work on that,” he says, sounding amused rather than disappointed.

But not now, of course. We've already used up the best part of the high again, and besides, I'm not as young as I used to be, and I'll need hours before I can go again. Damn.

He knows all that, too, of course. “I'll see you later,” is all he says, and starts disentangling himself from me, and putting his clothes back on properly. A moment later, he's gone. I depart at a slower pace, still light-headed, confused and not a little embarrassed. The cat we've long scared away. The little smouldering fire, from where the burning ends of our cigarettes have rolled under the cardboard stack, neither of us notices.

\+ + +

Again, I sleep like the dead. I have a very pleasant dream though, that starts with Cathy and me in bed together, like in happier times, and that morphs, half-way through, into an amalgamation of more recent experiences. Including someone with soft, full lips and a clever, clever tongue doing sweet, unearthly pleasant things to my already hard again cock. In my dream, I let out a long sigh, and then when I feel that I'm passing over the threshold into awakening, I try to curl up on my side, desperate to hang on to that dream for just a little longer before facing reality again. But I can't turn over, because there's a pair of strong hands on my hips, keeping me flat on my back. My eyes fly open.

“What the - “

“Mmmh,” his deep voice purrs in the pitch dark. “Sleep on. I was hoping it'd slow your reactions down enough for both of us to actually enjoy the ride, this time.”

I can practically hear him smirking in the darkness. He's on top of me, straddling my legs, and now he's running his hands up and down my flanks in something almost like a caress.

“What the _fuck_ are you doing?” There's no need to, but I whisper, as if reluctant to break a spell.

“Attending to some unfinished business.”

“Creeping up on me, that's what!” A part of my sleep-addled mind is actually quite displeased with how easy that seems to have been.

There is a pause while he bends down – a movement that I feel, rather than see – and goes to work on me with his tongue again. I dig my fingers into the sheets on either side, trying not to gasp.

“I should take notes,” he says after a moment, letting go of me just when it feels _really_ frustrating. “Four hours and thirty-two minutes.”

“What?”

“Four hours and thirty-two minutes from your last climax to beginning to build up again. Not bad, for a man your age.”

Is that where a man my age says “thank you”?

He chuckles. “I said 'see you later'.”

“I can't even see you.”

“You can feel me.”

He's a solid weight on my legs, a pair of hands ghosting along my torso, and a mouth doing unspeakable things whenever it isn't talking, but it isn't enough. I raise my hands, trying to feel more of him, and they find nothing but naked skin, his body completely exposed at last, every last square inch of it bared. Except I can't see any of it.

He pulls back, there's a rustling of cloth and then of plastic, and a moment later he's already got me covered up and slick again. He hovers above me like a deeper black shadow against the less black night, and then, without so much as a by-your-leave, he sinks down onto me, one hand on my chest and the other guiding me right inside.

Bright, almost unbearably bright stars explode behind my eyes, and they flutter closed, completely lost in the sensation.

“Breathe,” he whispers, and I try, but I can't. And then he starts moving, rocking back and forth in a slow curve, still keeping me steady with his hands, humming appreciatively every time I end up a little deeper inside him.

“Your hands,” he mutters. “Do what I do.” I understand, and close both hands around his own erection, pulsing hot and heavy against his stomach between us. I try to mimic with my fingers what he does to me with his arse, that slow rocking up and grinding back down, trapping his cock like he's trapped mine with just the right amount of pressure, and when I've found the right rhythm – not easy, distracted as I am - he sighs happily.

It's like a slow, lazy Sunday morning fuck, the kind that you never want to end, except it's three a. m. on a Tuesday and I need to get up for work in a couple of hours.

“No rush,” he mutters, as if he's read my mind, and gently pulls me back into that mesmerising rhythm, up and down, up and down, until _he_ deems the time ripe to speed things up ever so slightly, a more forceful shove downwards, a more teasing move upwards. Instinctively, I let go of him to grasp his hips and make sure I stay in.

“Selfish, hmm?” he whispers, and shifts above me. I gasp at the new angle, tighter than before, but I don't release my hold as he keeps rocking against me, riding me, faster now, harder and faster every moment, and it's a miracle I'm still holding out and not going over the edge right there and then.

 _Who's being selfish now?_ flashes across my muddled mind, but I find that I don't care. I can imagine what he looks like now, head thrown back and lips parted to let out wordless, rhythmic gasps as he pleasures himself on my cock, lost in his own arousal, oblivious to anything else in the world. I try to move my own hips, to make them push and buck against him, to break his rhythm and give him my own, but I can't. Trapped under him and unused to this, again he's the one who's in charge, and he doesn't seem to need anything from me but what's already inside him, hard and thick and very, _very_ close to exploding now.

My ears are filled with his voice, almost breaking now on every sound that escapes him. My legs are seizing up with the strain of bearing his weight and keeping him in place. My heart is pounding in my chest from the effort of pumping more and more blood down there where it's needed. And then my nose fills with the heady scent of pre-come, and at the last moment, I remember that he gave me a job to do after all. I move one of my hands back to his leaking erection, and the moment my fingers close around it, he clenches his arse around me, so suddenly and so forcefully that I cry out, and then the dam bursts and I'm giving him all I've got, even as I can feel him soil my fingers with his own release, hot and wet, until they're dripping with it.

\+ + +

Afterwards, for the first time, he stays. We don't exactly cuddle, but he climbs off me and stretches out at my side. I find myself resenting it ever so slightly that he's already back in his usual insolent ease while I'm still trying to get my breath back. But then, I _am_ the one with the grey hair here.

He wriggles his shoulders until he's comfortable on the bed, and seems ready to go straight to sleep.

“Could get used to this,” I can hear him mutter through the darkness.

“Don’t even think about it. Sneaky bastard.”

“I meant the bed,” he clarifies sleepily. “I don't mind the occasional romp on a rubbish dump, though, if that's what pushes your buttons.” And then, suddenly very quietly: “I've had worse.”

My heart misses a beat.

When he's silent after that – breathing deep, slow breaths that indicate sleep, actually – I spend the best part of the next ten minutes trying to imagine what sort of sex could actually be worse than sex on a rubbish dump, and it makes my mind wander down some very strange, very dark, and very disturbing paths.

So it’s really true, isn’t it? That if it wasn't me who was doing this with him, it would be someone else. Someone else, maybe, probably, _certainly_ , who didn't... care. And that idea kills me.

Looking back, this is the moment when he's managed to ensnare me for good.

It's amazing how far the term “Good Samaritan” can be stretched, at need.

\+ + +


	4. Chapter 4

Hours later, when it's already light outside, the door to my bedroom is thrown open with a flourish, and I sit up in bed with a jolt.

“Rise and shine, Detective Inspector,” he greets me breezily. “I'm off. I've got work to do, if you have none.” He's back in his good suit, and he's already got his coat on, too. “And next time you play with fire,” he adds innocently, “do consider putting it out when you're done.”

I frown. He tosses me the phone he's holding in his hand. I fumble, and it lands on the duvet. I pick it up, and realise that it's _my_ phone. Well. If a lock on a door is no problem for him, then this shouldn't surprise me either.

The clock on the phone says it's nine-thirty, dammit, and the headline on a news site he's pulled up says “Historic Townhouse on Berwick Street Damaged by Fire – Restaurant Evacuated”, dammit doubly and triply.

“You've also got a message that you might want to answer,” he informs me in the same innocent tone as before, and then he's gone.

I sink back against the cushions, feeling miserable. Looking out of the window into the light of the morning of the last day of October, I try to make up my mind which of the three disasters to face first. The fire wins.

The news report says that there was a blaze on Wardour Mews last night. A stack of discarded paper caught fire, severely damaging the rear wall of the building, and rendering the restaurant unusable. Nobody was hurt because both the employees and the patrons were all evacuated from the premises in time, but the incident is being investigated by the police.

Bloody fucking _hell_. Playing with fire, indeed.

The text message looks comparatively harmless, by comparison.

_Greg, can we start over, please?_

Well, at least there's a chance then that when I go to prison for starting a fire in a densely populated part of the West End, I'll have a loving wife waiting for me to come out again.

Then a moment later, the memory of what I witnessed at the _Marc Antoine_ last night comes back with a vengeance. I realise what she's trying to do, and it makes me sick. I’d rather go to prison than play the part she’s trying to assign to me now.

Has she really been using those past nine days only to build a new and more elaborate web of deceit? Does she really think she can secretly carry on with him while officially reconciling with me? How thick exactly does she think I am, to buy that? No, not thick, is my next thought. _Weak._

 _Of course,_ I write back, my lips pressed together so tightly it almost hurts. _Let's meet up. Marc Antoine on Wardour St at 8 tonight? Since that seems to be one of your favourite haunts lately._

I send it off without the least hesitation, and without the least compunction. She's cut me off, well and truly, so now I'm free to cut her off, too.

\+ + +

The third disaster – DI Lestrade, known for strict adherence to secondary virtues such as punctuality, and expecting no less from his subordinates, being late to work _again_ – turns out to be no disaster at all. Thank God for small mercies.

“Never mind,” Sally says, more pointedly than kindly, when I enter the office, and with a sigh, I acknowledge that she can count to nine as well as I can.

I do take care, however, that she's off on an errand somewhere by the time I get ready to leave for home that night. I just couldn't stand her wishing me good luck, when it's already over anyway.

It _is_ over, because the next I hear from Cathy, after several days of silence, is a letter from a solicitor, proposing a settlement. But by that time, I’m so deep in my new trouble that it barely affects me.

That’s not true though. It does affect me – how could it not? - and I’m _glad_ in a twisted way that he picks that same night for our next meeting. I take him to bed, and he takes my cock up his arse and my mind off things.

I need that more than ever, not just because of the solicitor. I’ve had another rather unpleasant encounter that day, this time with my colleague Tobias Gregson.

We meet at the coffee machine - he's a DI in the same department, his office only a couple of doors down from mine – and he immediately pounces on me, in his usual intolerably cheerful manner.

“Oh, good!” he exclaims the moment he sees me. “I was just going to hunt you down. You heard about that fire? Wardour Mews? Japanese restaurant?”

I'm so dumbstruck, I can only nod. More than once over the past days, I've been tempted to look the incident up in our database, to get an idea of where the investigation was going. But I refrained, because I figured it wasn't a good idea to draw attention to myself by being unduly interested in it. I didn't even know who was investigating it. If it's Gregson, it's been assigned to us at Serious Crime. Meaning they're suspecting arson, so the chances of the investigation being cursory and soon concluded without result are about zero. _Shit._

Thankfully, Gregson mistakes my silence for nothing but polite interest. And he immediately proceeds to make things even worse. “You know, that friend of yours that you say's been giving you useful ideas once in a while? The private detective? I immediately thought of him, and hence, of you.”

My throat constricts, as if there’s something tightening around it. “Oh? Why?” I manage to get out, and busy myself with adding sugar and milk to my coffee. Bad idea. My hands are trembling.

“Listen,” Gregson natters on, mercifully oblivious of my reaction. “One of the waitresses opened the back door not ten minutes before the blaze started. She was going out there for a cigarette break, but then turned back at the last moment, because guess what? There was someone already there.”

“The arsonist?” I suggest. My voice sounds hollow in my own ears.

“No.” Gregson chuckles indulgently. “A couple, having sex. Right there on the cardboard stack where the fire started.” He grins at my shocked face. “Well, we've been through the debris with a fine-tooth comb, of course, and we found the ends of two cigarettes at the bottom, half smoked and then burnt. So no big mystery as to how that fire started.” He clears his throat and straightens his shoulders. “But I mean, overcome by passion or no, it's still a case of criminal negligence, of course, so it's imperative that they're found. Which is where you and your friend come in.”

In my desperation, I take a sip of my still far too hot coffee so I can avoid his eyes. It promptly burns my tongue, and I flinch.

“Easy, there,” Gregson advises me kindly. “See, I could do with some help. There's nothing to go on to identify the culprits. The cigarettes were burned too badly to extract any DNA. There's a camera, but it points at the back of the house. The corner with the rubbish was at a dead angle. And the witness statement is not very helpful either.”

“What did the girl say she saw?” My heart is beating wildly in my chest now. I should know better - if Gregson knew who he’s talking to, we’d be sitting in an interrogation room, not chatting in a corridor. But if he’s got even the vaguest suspicion, and is trying to sound me out...

“Not much,” he replies with a shrug. “The man she described as middle-aged, greying hair, 'average-looking' were her words, I think. The woman she couldn't see at all, because she was under him and he all over her.”

I close my eyes for a brief moment, and let relief flood me. No DNA. No camera. No details in the witness statement. What a blessing to be 'average-looking'. I'll never regret it again.

“So, I thought that's the kind of puzzle that your friend's so good at solving,” Gregson concludes. “D'you think he'd take a - “ He cuts himself short then, and narrows his eyes. “You alright, Greg? You look a bit peaky.”

“I – yeah, I'm – I'm alright.” I run a hand over my face. “Just a bit tired. Sorry. I'll – I'll tell him about it. I'll let you know if he's interested.”

“Cheers.” Gregson smiles, but then he becomes serious again. “And Greg? Take it easy, alright? Take it _easy_.” He even gives me a pat on the shoulder, well-meant, downright paternal, but it makes me feel ill.

\+ + +

That night, when he stretches out next to me, with that sated afterglow that always makes him look so beautiful still on him, I tell him the story.

He laughs. “Next time, make sure you put a little more effort into deflecting suspicion properly, not just trusting to luck like that. I’m disappointed in you, Lestrade. A waitress, trying to sneak a cigarette - Isn't it obvious that she made the whole story about the copulating couple up to cover up her own negligence? I’d have made sure to plant that thought firmly in your colleague’s mind.”

“Jesus, that's sick,” I say, and I mean it. Seriously, sometimes I can see why Sally Donovan calls him a freak. I can certainly see why he frightens her.

He only grins. And that's the last time we talk about the incident.

I can't forget it, though, and I'm seriously considering owning up when a couple of days later, I read in the papers that an anonymous donor – probably a regular patron – has saved the owners of the restaurant from certain bankruptcy by promising to pay for all necessary repairs. I dismiss all thoughts of turning myself in then. I don’t supposed I’d ever have been brave enough to do it anyway. But as it is now, everyone seems quite happy to file it as unsolved, and Gregson doesn't even hold it against me that I didn't get Sherlock to investigate the case, because, um, he was too busy with other things, sorry.

\+ + +

It's not even technically true, because we don’t meet every night any more. I would, but he’s dosing things a little more carefully now, making himself scarce, knowing full well that with a bit of a build-up beforehand, the release will feel all the better.

He’s also dosing other things a little more carefully now. It’s touching, really, how he switches to snorting instead of injecting, once we’ve progressed to undressing fully as a regular part of the ritual, and there’d be no way to hide the needle marks from me. It doesn’t alter the fact that he still only ever sleeps with me when he’s high, but it makes that easier to ignore. Considerate of him, isn’t it?

Snorting the stuff also means it’s easier for him to refuel unobtrusively when he stays over. At first, I take his new willingness to stay with me after sex for a good sign, a sign of trust, maybe even of something resembling affection. It was slightly disturbing to wake up to him on top of me, and me already three-quarters along the way again without even being aware of it. But I could honestly get used to the idea of starting the day by being gently sucked to consciousness - if it wasn’t for the price of the tiny traces of white powder dusting the rim of the washbasin in my bathroom, every time.

When I discover them for the first time, I lose it completely. It’s one of those - admittedly rare - moments when the words WRONG WRONG WRONG come flashing across my mind with such force and intensity that they’re impossible to ignore. I march back to the bedroom where he’s still lazing around in a nest of damp, sticky sheets, bang the door shut behind me, and read him the riot act.

“Not in my bathroom!” I shout at him.

“I can do it in the kitchen,” he says, pupils already huge and dark again in the unforgiving morning light. “Or in the living room. Or in here. Any smooth, hard surface would do.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do _you_ know what you mean?”

He watches me, with his eyes narrowed, and I deflate, hating him. We both know perfectly well that we wouldn’t do what we do if he was sober, but that stopping doing what we do isn’t an option either. Because that would mean acknowledging _why_ we’re doing it, what we’re both running from, and that would be painful beyond bearing.

He sneezes at that point, loudly and heartily, like a child, and then he starts dripping little bright drops of blood onto the sheets from his sore, tortured nose. I turn my back on him, desperate to silence the little voice in my head that tells me that nothing’s for free in this world.

I don’t mention it again when we next meet, nor the time after that, nor the time after _that._ And there are many times, each better than the next as we expand our repertoire.

\+ + +

If I thought that our first week together, back in October, was mind-blowing and the best we could do, I was wrong. He clearly liked it, even though it was fast and rough. He was giving as good as he got, and content with a less-than-elaborate technique, too, as long as it got both of us there by way of hands and mouths. But it was straightforward and uncomplicated, and of course that’s actually as unlike him as things ever get.

Once we’ve graduated from mutual masturbation to full-blown intercourse, I discover that there's quite another side to him in bed. When he’s on the receiving end, he _is_ a princess. And the princess needs a lot more expertise and patience to be happy. The princess likes giving exact instructions, too, as opposed to his bloke-y self that used to just let me go ahead, and trusted me to get it right. And the princess tells me so in no uncertain terms when I’m doing something not entirely to her liking. She’s bossy, she’s demanding, and she’s driving me nuts. But she never says “no”, and that's the deciding factor.

He has developed an uncanny sixth sense for _when_ I need him most, too, when the emptiness and the silence in my home bears me down even worse than usual. Like a shark that can smell a single drop of blood in boundless ocean, he seems to know when there’s a new letter from her solicitor with more demands; he seems to know when I return from yet another depressing appointment with my own; he seems to know when Cathy’s been to the flat to collect more of her things while I was absent at work; he seems to know exactly when I’m at my weakest. He's always there then, and he’s always at _his_ sweetest, spreading his legs for me readily and willingly, always soft and loose already and feeling almost like a real girl when I sink into him, slowly in and half-way out again in my own rhythm for once, while he’s kneading the cheeks of my arse with his hands and muttering to me, with his eyes closed, how _good_ it feels.

I take a while to realise that it’s by no means a magical sense of intuition, let alone coincidence, that brings him to me every time my life takes another turn for the worse, every time I get another reminder of just how badly it’s derailed. It’s deliberate, it’s methodical, and it’s utterly selfish in the end, because of course, every time I console myself like that, my life derails a little further.

Because if everything comes at a price, who said that he’d be the only one paying it? I got off the hook about the fire by sheer goddamn luck, but now I'm really starting to pay, too.

Soon, it's not only Gregson that I'm having trouble looking in the eye. Having a sergeant on my team who’s extremely quick on the uptake has always been an advantage so far. Now it’s turning into a problem. I don’t regret that I told Sally Donovan about my troubles with Cathy in the first place, because me being insufferable without giving a reason for it would only have spurred her on, trying to find out what was behind it. And it’s also served as a handy excuse for my less-than-satisfactory performance at work, so far.

But of course it doesn’t explain everything.

It doesn’t explain why I’m withdrawing more and more from my colleagues now, reserving all my rare free hours for someone else, and avoiding any casual social situations that might lead to awkward questions. No more Friday after-work drinks, ever.

It also doesn’t explain the fact that when I haven’t seen him for a couple of days, I start checking my phone compulsively for a message fixing our next rendezvous, even in completely inappropriate situations.

And it didn't explain that damned bite mark on my neck that must have started her suspicions; the first clear sign that there was someone in my life who was sapping all the remaining energy from it, someone else than my estranged wife, someone _worse_.

Ever since Day Nine, Sally has made a habit of asking me how things are going. She still means it kindly to start with, but over the following weeks, there’s a subtle shift. She keeps putting in extra hours to get done what I let slide, but she clearly isn't ready to do it for much longer. Things that used to matter to me and that still matter to her, like our team’s performance, and our team’s reputation, come into it, too. Kindness changes into covert disapproval, and from there into open disapproval, and by the time I realise just how badly it’s affecting her, it's almost too late already.

One day, while we're on a scene by the Thames, looking into what may or may not have been a tragic boating accident, I overhear her talking on the phone. She's doing her best to placate Gregson that that summary on some recent armed robberies in Barking _is_ forthcoming and he’ll soon have all the details he’ll need to check them against a series of armed robberies in Dagenham that his own team is looking into.

“You know what it’s like at the moment,” she says into the phone, lowering her voice. “He’s not himself, no surprise. He’d never have let you wait so long otherwise. I’m sorry.”

Here I am, letting her make excuses for me that she probably no longer believes in herself.

That evening, when we've wrapped up work for the day, she happens to be waiting for the lift at the same time as me. She's silent all the way down, but when the doors open on the ground floor and she's about to get out, she turns back to me.

“Take care of yourself at least, will you?” she says without a smile. “If you can.”

Listen to that. Technically, she’s in no position to criticise either my attitude towards work nor, much less, the way I run my private life. But that’s Sally Donovan alright – she speaks her mind, consequences be damned. I used to truly respect and admire her for it. But now, when the lift doors have closed again and she’s gone, all it does is make me feel rotten. After all, she knows what can happen when people who need help don’t get help. She knows what can happen when people cling to people who make everything just worse. She hasn’t been on the domestic violence task force for three years for nothing.

But being made to feel rotten is never very constructive, of course. So the next time we're on the subject, I let her feel my resentment.

She’s been watching me, absorbed in my phone again during a meeting with Gregson’s team that, unlike most meetings at work, actually would have required attention and input on my part. Because you don’t just sit there and nod when there’s a highly organised gang of criminals systematically emptying the tills of the East London petrol stations, pointing guns at the terrified staff. Or so I used to feel about these things. But when afterwards, Sally draws my attention to the fact that I no longer seem to care and that it’s disquieting, I’m _this_ far away from barking at her that I’m her boss and she doesn’t tell me how to do my job and that’s it.

“I’m _worried_ , Greg,” she says bluntly.

“No need,” I snap. “We’ve dealt with armed robberies before.”

“Not what I meant,” she says, and crosses her arms belligerently.

“What do you mean, then?” I ask back stubbornly. “Come on, spit it out.”

She sighs, and lets her arms fall back to her sides. She’s bold and unafraid, but she’s been formed by the Metropolitan Police Service after all, and telling your superior to his face that he’s neglecting his work in favour of pursuing some private obsession that can’t possibly be healthy is something that we don’t exactly do hereabouts. All the same, the look of pity she gives me just before she departs to return to her own desk is far worse than any open reproach could ever have been.

\+ + +


	5. Chapter 5

And then comes the day when Sherlock puts things to the test, and turns up at one of our crime scenes, for the first time since the twelfth of October.

It’s not me who calls him in – of course it isn't. I’ve avoided even talking about work to him lately. What would be the point? It won’t happen anymore, us working together effectively on a case. How could it, when all I'd be able to think about in his presence is when I’ll get the next chance to shove my cock up his arse and fuck him like there’s no tomorrow?

So he invites himself, even before I can make a conscious decision not to involve him in this particular case.

It _is_ spectacular, though, and he wouldn’t have wanted to miss it. In broad daylight, at half past ten in the morning, two men on a motor scooter drive up to a little Italian café on Canary Wharf. The one on the pillion seat fires a couple of rounds through the shop window with a submachine gun, mowing down the owner and his girlfriend, and sending the customers and the rest of the staff scrambling for cover. Then they depart as quickly as they came.

The place is in complete and utter mayhem when Sally and I arrive. Some uniformed colleagues are trying to cordon off the area, but the place is still crowded with crying, shaking witnesses, overtaxed paramedics, and curious onlookers. In the eye of the storm, however, it’s curiously quiet. The two bodies are lying almost side by side behind the bar, and next to them, squatting on the blood-spattered black and white chequered flagstones and going through the pockets of the dead Italians, is a familiar figure in a long dark coat.  
  
“He said you’d sent him ahead, sir,” the young constable who has been placed on guard at the door hurries to explain. “He said you'd insist on letting him get in before anyone else.”

Sally Donovan, behind me, inhales sharply in indignation. I merely nod. What else can I do? I can’t make a scene and throw him out, not with half the Docklands looking on, can I? At least not before we've established whether he has anything useful to say.

He chooses that moment to look up at me, and grins wryly.

“I figured we had a better chance of clearing this up if I came before Anderson and friends started messing up all the evidence,” he offers by way of explanation.

“How the fuck did you even know about this?”

“Oh, news travels fast in our city,” he dismisses the issue. “You can’t wave a submachine gun around in Central London and then hope that nobody will Twitter about it.”

He straightens up, and just then, Anderson comes through the door, already in a coverall, and looking even paler and more pinched than he usually does when he spots Sherlock dancing around one of our crime scenes.

“Don’t bother,” Sherlock tells him, waving his hand towards the two bodies. “There’s nothing here that could help you to find the murderers.” He takes in Anderson’s miserable expression with a single glance. “If I were you, I’d go home and get into bed with a nice cup of chamomile tea and cure that nasty gastritis, instead of trying to pretend that you can actually be of use here. What caused it this time? Your son been caught sending compromising pictures of his ex-girlfriend to his classmates again? Or the bank getting impatient about your mortgage being so far in arrears?”

“ _What?_ ” Sally’s skin flushes three shades darker with indignation. Anderson just stands there, gaping.

And I?  
  
Do I imagine it, or do his eyes flicker towards me then, for the shortest of moments, testing me, daring me outright to protest, to call him to order, to put him in his place?

I don’t do it.

\+ + +

A few minutes later, he and I are outside the café, while Sally calms Anderson down enough to actually do his job inside.

He lights a cigarette, and offers me one, too.

“This is a crime scene, you know,” I object.

“Sudden fit of piety?” he mocks me, and deliberately flicks a bit of ash onto the ground.

“You know what I mean.” We’ve been over this before, after all. Keeping crime scenes uncontaminated. Keeping evidence admissible in court. “You could at least have the goodness to tell us _what_ they should be looking for,” I grumble.

He smiles. “I told you, there's nothing to find.”

And with that, he walks off.

Sally joins me, so soon that she must have overheard our last exchange.

“You can't let him do that,” she says with decision.

“What, smoke at crime scenes?” I reply, deliberately obtuse.

“You know what.”

“I didn't ask him to come, you know.”

“And Philip didn't ask him to throw vitriol at him either, I'm sure.”

I sigh. “I thought we'd agreed on the ends sometimes justifying the means, Sally?”

“On the basis of last year's frequency of unprovoked insults, yes,” she snaps, aping Sherlock's best didactic tone. “But they've increased by over a hundred percent since then, both in quantity and in quality. So quite frankly, I no longer consider myself bound. And besides,” she continues even louder, working herself into quite a rage, “what ends, anyway? Case solved, huh? Not that I can see. All we've got is what looks like a ruthless Mafia murder right on our doorstep, and our famous consulting detective walking away as if – “

“As if it’s none of his business. Which is what you just said yourself. Make some sense, Donovan. A minute ago you were complaining about him being here, now you’re objecting to him walking away?”

She looks at me, and only shakes her head.

\+ + +

Later that afternoon, back at NSY and right in the middle of some hectic collecting and sorting of data, deflecting nosy phone calls from the press, and appeasing incensed superiors demanding to know whether we’re in London or in fucking _Palermo_ , Lestrade?, he comes walking through the door – as always, like he owns the place - and sits down uninvited in the visitor’s chair in my office.

“What is it now?” I ask, distractedly taking a sip of long-cold coffee. It tastes disgusting.

“Solved it yet?” he asks back, with a sarcastic glance at the mess of papers on my desk, and at the members of my team running around like headless chickens on the other side of the glass partition.

“Hard to tell, is it?” I grumble.

He smiles. “Then you’ll be happy to hear that I’m here to put you out of your misery.”

At that moment, Sally Donovan enters, with what looks like the file from the Home Office we requested. “Born in Bolzano,” she announces, ignoring my visitor. “Always lived there til he came to the UK, no known connection to any organisation – “

“Oh, come on,” he cuts her off. “Surely you’re aware that you’re looking at a Mafia killing?”

“Bolzano is practically in Austria,” I protest. “Not exactly Mafia heartland.”

He digs into his pocket, and takes out a small shiny object that he places on my desk. I lean in for a better look. It is a little silver figurine on a fine chain, barely two inches long, of a woman in a long robe, her head surrounded by a halo, and what looks like arrows or daggers sticking out of her chest.

“Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows,” he says. “Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori. The identifying mark of the village of the same name in Calabria, rather notorious for its inhabitants’ close ties with the 'Ndrangheta.”

“Where does it come from?” I demand sharply.

“ _Please_.” He rolls his eyes. “Surely you’ve managed to look up more than one person’s birthplace since this morning?”

“The girl,” Sally says abruptly.

Sherlock looks at her with an expression of mock admiration. “Very good, sergeant. Although it was probably not so difficult to figure out that she had something to do with this, since she was lying dead on the floor right there for you to stumble over. Hard to miss, that, even for someone with _your_ – “

“No, wait,” I interrupt him. “She doesn’t even have a name yet.”

“No matter,” he shrugs. “You know where she came from, what more do you need?”

“She wore _this_ ,” Sally says, stabbing an accusing finger at the silver image of Saint Mary. “She wore this, and now it’s in _your_ pocket.”

Sherlock nods, unconcerned, almost amused, as if he already knows that there’s an outburst to come, and is looking forward to it. She promptly does him the favour.

“Then how _exactly_ ,” she continues, her voice raised in righteous indignation, “do you suppose this thing can serve as evidence now, found far from the crime scene and with nothing to link it back to the victim? Have you _any_ idea what the Crown Prosecutor is going to make of that? Let alone the defence?” She pauses to take a deep breath, her face flushed with anger, then abruptly turns to me. “The end justifying the means, huh? Is that supposed to be it? Solve the case, at the expense of making sure the killers can’t be convicted?”

She’s got a point. Oh, such a big point.

“Sally, please,” he says in his deepest, most mesmerising voice. “Calm down, or how will the good Inspector explain the scratch marks on his face when the Superintendent comes round later today to check on his progress?”

She lets out a snarl, like a true wildcat.

“And as usual,” he continues, unimpressed, “you haven’t been listening. I told you, back at the scene, that there was nothing there that could help you to find the murderers.”

“Because you’d already sneaked it into your pocket!”

“No, _including_ what I’d sneaked into my pocket. I was ninety percent sure already of what this little piece of jewellery signified when I found it, so I was ninety percent sure, too, that there was no chance you’d ever identify, let alone apprehend, the killers. A few hours of research, and now we're looking at a hundred and fifty percent certainty.” He addresses me again, revving up his voice to rapid fire mode. “The Sette Dolori clan is known and feared for their highly professional MO. Even if you do manage to put names to the shooters, there'll be no record of them ever having been in this country, much less of them having been anywhere near that café today. They'd planned their exit strategy perfectly, leaving you no chance whatsoever to get between them and their escape. They’ve already made it, of course. A private charter left from London City Airport for Reggio di Calabria shortly after eleven this morning, with two apparently very respectable Italian businessmen on board. If you go and interview the airport staff, they’ll remember them being rather out of breath on arrival, blaming the heavy traffic between their hotel and the airport. So by a quarter past eleven this morning, the significance of this figurine had already become a purely academic one. Nothing to do with your petty rules of procedure.” He turns back to Sally. “So no need to get your knickers into a twist over this.” He lets her eyes travel down from her face to the skirt she’s wearing, blatantly offensive. “Probably a useful bit of general advice, that,” he sneers, his eyes on her crotch. “Might do wonders to help you relax.”

There is a moment of thunderstruck silence. Then Sally drops the file she’s been holding onto the desk, takes a swing and slaps him so hard across the face that his nose instantly starts bleeding again.

\+ + +

There's no trace of that left on his face when I find him naked on my bed, that evening when I get home. But then, my attention isn't exactly focussed on his face anyway when I enter the room.

I'm still seething with anger, both at him for being such a prick, but even more at myself for not standing up to him – and for my officers – like I should. But all of that is in great danger of flying out of the window again at the sight of him now. My eyes fix on his long legs, propped up comfortably, white in the dim light. He's let them fall open just far enough to make my skin tingle with expectation. I also miss the fact that the door of the wardrobe stands wide open.

“There you are,” he greets me lazily, taking in my reaction with a single glance. The two warring emotions – _no not this time you manipulative sod!_ and _Jesus hell yes right now!_ must show plainly on my face. He smiles. “Don't let yourself get distracted. You're angry with me, remember? Really angry. Well, go ahead and do something about it.”

There's something on the bed next to him, and he picks it up and holds it out to me, handle first. I take it almost automatically, but my breath hitches when I realise what it is. A short by very solid looking riding crop, made of black leather.

I swallow. Once, twice, three times. He can't be serious. Then again –

My hand tightens around the smooth handle.

He smirks.

Again, he's testing me, and he's amused at what he finds. That alone deserves a good thrashing, and by God, it's about time someone gave it to him.

But that would mean proving him right, wouldn't it? Oh, to hell with him. I'm not made for mind games like these.

 _That's exactly why he loves playing them with you,_ a little voice says in my head.

“Where did you get this?” I ask instead, trying to keep my eyes solely on his face now.

“You sure you want to hear the answer?”

“Would I ask else?”

“Well, deduce it, Inspector.”

The evidence is staring me in the face, and I realise it just as he jerks his head wordlessly at the open wardrobe. Our wardrobe. The wardrobe with the locked safe in it where Cathy keeps her jewellery. At least that's what I _thought_ she kept in there.

I drop what I'm holding in my hand, as if it's burning my fingers.

“Barely used though, if you look closely,” he comments drily. “In case that's a comfort. Just like this one, by the way.” He tilts up his hips and gives me a better view of what's between his legs, which is half an erection and a generous amount of wetly shining lubricant further below, all around a black rubber _something_ that's sticking right out of his -

“Jesus fucking _Christ_ ,” is all I manage to get out.

He chuckles, and the thing _moves_. “You know, most people chicken out when they get an actual chance to put their fantasies into practice. Wouldn't hold it against them.”

I'm having trouble breathing. There’s nothing that seems more inviting right now than flipping him over and having a go at that white arse of his with the riding crop until his skin is burning red, and forcing that black travesty deeper into him at every stroke until he's begging me to stop. I wouldn't stop though, I'd go on and on, harder and harder, until his skin was raw and bleeding and he was screaming with pain and pleasure combined while that thing up his hole was fucking him relentlessly to within an inch of his life, my hand clamped around his own straining cock, not just delaying but for once completely denying him the release he's desperate for, no matter how he'd whimper and beg, because that's what he deserves.

He's watching me. He's watching me bite my lip, he's watching my heart beat up to my throat, he's watching me curl my hands into fists. We're still playing a game. We always are. It’s unwise to ever forget it.

I reach out, pluck the thing out of him – and what an _obscene_ squelching sound that makes – and send it to join the riding crop on the carpet.

“Jealous?” he grins.

_Hell, yes._

I proceed to do my best to fuck him within an inch of his life then, and he does his inspired best to turn it from the punishment that it was meant to be into a festival of dirty entertainment, spurring me on with a lot of breathless “oh God, deeper” and “yeah, give it to me, give me all you've got” and then eventually just wordless high-pitched moans that make him sound like some third rate porn queen.

There has always been a good deal of show in his enthusiasm, quite a bit of carefully dosed, exactly calculated _apparent_ ecstasy, but it’s never been so blatantly artificial. But when I free a hand to clap it over his mouth to make him shut up, he only turns that against me, too, and starts licking and sucking my fingers with relish.

I take a longer time to come than I usually do, probably because I'm so distracted by the images that this voice I've never heard from him before keeps conjuring up in my mind. Is that what _he_ heard from _her_ , too, when they got to play with those toys? Did she get a kick out of submitting to him, of having that thick black rubber thing put into her, and of the riding crop swishing down on her smooth tanned skin? Or was it the other way round, and it was _her_ meting out punishment to _him_ , for whatever ridiculous imaginary disobedience? Was _he_ the one panting beneath her, did she like to watch _him_ take that thing up -

It's a mortifyingly strong and intense climax that practically bowls me over at that point, the sort that makes your eyes roll back into your head and shuts your brain down for a moment.

I resurface to find that he's gone quiet, but only because he's secretly at work getting himself there, too. I should stop him, I should have that much self-respect at least. All I'd have to do would be to reach out with my hand and close it around him, demanding that he agrees to never snub me or anyone on my team again, and never to go behind our backs and steal evidence from a crime scene again, if he wants to keep working with me. But my limbs feel like lead, and my head is filled with candy floss, and the only thing I can think is that I want to keep fucking him forever, and everything else takes second place.

“Can I keep that?” I hear him ask me a few moments – or hours, I couldn't tell – later, and I realise that he's picked up the riding crop and is studying it with interest, turning it this way and that.

“Burn it,” I mutter.

\+ + +

About a week and two more fucks after that, at the end of November, there's another one.

“I’m calling him,” I tell Sally Donovan when we get the lab results, and learn about the curious coincidence that some unhappy teenager has somehow got his hands on the same unusual combination of lethal drugs that Sir Jeffrey Patterson killed himself with, over a month ago.

I know it will put a massive strain on my team if I bring him in again after the Mafia disaster, but over the years, I’ve developed something like an instinct for when we’re truly in above our heads, and I can tell this is one of those times.

The petrol station gang is safely behind bars, thanks mostly to the efforts of Gregson's team, but these apparent suicides aren't classic crime that's under control as soon as you identify the pattern and apply the classic countermeasures. There’s something ominous about the parallels between the deaths of Sir Jeffrey and young James Phillimore, but I can’t pin down what it is. I'm at a loss, and I could really do with some input from a brighter mind than mine and Sally’s.

So, “I'm calling him,” I announce.

“No, you’re not,” she says firmly. “We can do this on our own, Greg.”

“I’ll just tell him about it, alright?” I suggest. “Just in case he gets a brainwave.” She crosses her arms obstinately. “Sally, don’t be childish.”

“I’m not going to listen to him insult me like that again. Or Philip,” she adds fiercely. “Philip’s got enough on his plate as it is, you know, and I’m not a punching bag either.”

My mind goes back to how she paid him back in kind last time they met, to how she stalked out of my office, leaving him sitting there with the back of his hand pressed to his bleeding nose and a very lopsided grin on his face.

“Punching bag?” I remind her. “Pot, kettle, black, hmm?”

She pulls a face. “I was doing _your_ job, Greg,” she says. She hesitates for the slightest moment, but then forges ahead regardless. “As you may have noticed, I have a lot of experience in that field by now.”

The bitter tone in her voice makes my stomach clench.

_Apologise. Do it. Apologise. Say you're sorry, and promise that it won't happen again._

“I – “

I can’t. It’s not that I can’t say I’m sorry, because I truly am. It’s that I know it won't change anything. I’ve tried this before, after all, tried to reform, tried do better, tried to keep away from him. It held for little more than a week last time, and then it got even worse than before. I'm not going to make any more promises now that I won't be able to keep.

“ _Don’t_ tell him about it,” she concludes the conversation. “All he’ll do is laugh at you, and deride you, and despise you. I don’t suppose you care. I don’t suppose you even notice it any more. But I see it, and I care, and I’m not going to watch it happen again if I have anything to do with it.”

Sadly, she hasn’t.

\+ + +

“There’s been another one,” I tell him that night, when we’re side by side in bed, sweaty and exhausted and completely fed up with each other for once. My heart wasn't in it, he was getting impatient, I told him to shut up and let me just bloody _get on with it_ , he cuffed me in the head, I took him with too little preparation, he complained, I told him to shut up again, he cuffed me again, and when I was finally pumping into him, bringing myself to a laboured, messy climax that felt more like a chore than a pleasure, he’d already been there for minutes anyway and was clearly getting bored.

“Another what?” he mumbles now, not really listening.

“Another suicide.”  
  
“There are between fifteen and twenty in the UK every day, Lestrade,” he scoffs. “What’s new about this one?”

“It’s another of those that shouldn’t have happened.”

“Are you implying that there are suicides that _should_ happen?” he asks with a yawn, not interested in the least.

“Jesus, just listen, will you? It's another one with no motive, the same unusual mix of poisons, and with the body found nowhere it should be.”

“Oh, don’t tell me depressing bedtime stories. No motive because you haven’t looked close enough, no link to the place where they were found because you’re too stupid to find it, and the drug probably just the dernier cri on the assisted suicide market in the Netherlands,” he concludes. “There you go. Case solved.” And he turns away from me to face the wall, pulling the duvet up to his naked shoulders.

I should know better than to bother him with mundane requests such as helping me keep London safe when he's on the comedown.

\+ + +


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter needs to come with a warning, I'm afraid. My dub con may be your non con.

That night wasn't just an unpleasant exception. It's symptomatic of how our get-togethers have started to feel. Ever since the day when he opened the safe in my wardrobe and let out the demons that were imprisoned in there, there's been a subtle shift in how we talk to each other, and how we treat each other, and it's not for the better.

It's as if the anger that I felt at him that day has never truly evaporated. It's always below the surface now, always a latent willingness to be pissed off with him, and no willingness any more to attribute everything that's wrong about this to my own shortcomings and my own weakness.

The urge to put him in his place, to bend him to my will, to punish him for what a mess my life has become, grows stronger and stronger. The images that he conjured up that night when he handed me the riding crop and for all I know bloody fucking truly meant me to use it, if I'd only had the _guts_ to do it, stay with me as if they've burned themselves into my brain.

The idea of him on his hands and knees, impaled on that thick, heavy, lifeless thing, arse raised and presented to me willingly for punishment with no regard for his own needs, accompanies me through the days and through the nights when he's not there, and every time I allow myself to dwell on it, I add more details, and it just gets better and better.

In my mind, he's always a bit restless when I insert the fake cock into him at the start of these sessions that never take place except inside my head. But he acknowledges that it's _my_ exclusive right to decide how he's going to find his pleasure. He's got used to getting on his knees and bending over as soon as I tell him to, spreading the cheeks of his arse with both hands so I can work it into him, generously coated with lube to ease the way, a warm steadying hand on the small of his back, whispering to him how well he's taking it and how beautiful he is like this.

This part of the ritual is indispensable. It may not be his favourite part, but he needs to be aware that he's having no say in this, and that all he's here for is to take from me what I give him, and to be grateful for it.

After that's been established, I always pick up the riding crop. I can feel the weight of it in my hand as I'm letting it whistle through the air. He tenses at the sound, knowing what's to come. He knows it's the flip side of the same coin, and that punishment and reward belong together. He braces himself, and I start letting the riding crop smack down onto his bare skin, making him gasp and flinch with the pain of it, but also making him a little harder every time. The toy inside him soon trembles with the strain, the fake black balls lodged firmly against the sensitive skin around his stretched hole.

After a while, I pause to put my hand between his legs from behind to test the degree of his arousal, and I can feel the satisfying heaviness of his cock and balls, and hear his desperate little whimper as he pushes against my hand, straining for friction.

Always a little sooner than I planned to, I put the riding crop aside, and my other hand against the base of the toy, pushing him forward into my hand until I've got him trapped from both sides. “Move,” I whisper to him, and he obeys instantly (of course – this isn't real, after all). He rocks back against me to press the faux cock even deeper into himself, and then forward into the ring that I've formed with my fingers, dragging them down his whole burning hot length, and then the same all over again, and again. A soft, delighted sigh escapes him every time, not the hysterical porn queen sort, but born of deep, real pleasure and comfort at being taken care of after punishment. I can see his fingers tighten as he's clutching the sheets, and a sheen of sweat breaks out all over his body, on his back, on his chest, on his face. He's always got his eyes closed, always trusting me to know what's best for him, and happy to take whatever I give him.

We can do this endlessly, he fucking himself on the toy that I'm holding in place, and fucking into my hand at the same time, given over to my utter control of the situation.

When I find that he's deserved another treat, I change the angle of the toy a bit, a little steeper, and aim straight for that sweet spot deep inside him that I, in reality, usually only hit by coincidence, if at all. I find it on the first try, he throws his head back, and a deep, throaty moan breaks out of him, pure gratitude. I can't get enough of those moans, so I turn them into a whole series, tearing them from his trembling lips every single time the toy grates against the right place. The moans become words then.

“Please,” he begs, “please... please...” and I close my fingers a little more tightly around his erection, assuring him that I'm there and that if he continues to be such a good boy, I'll still have an even better reward for him. He shudders in expectation, and tilts his burning arse up even further, offering himself up, desperate for me to enter him and own him and make him mine for real. I run a hand along the creamy white insides of his thighs and push them further apart, until he's utterly open and vulnerable.

“Take me,” he gasps, and he means it, because all he wants now is me granting him what he's earned.

I take a moment to worship his beautiful body, running my fingers along the sharp bones of his hips and the firm roundness of his buttocks and into the small dell just above his crease where the sweat has pooled, drawing lazy patterns on his lower back with the tip of my finger while he's panting with frustration and need.

And finally, I have mercy on him. I remove the toy, but slowly now, inch by inch, enjoying the view of the tight ring of muscle around it contracting and relaxing again. He always regrets that loss a little, because he knows and loves what it signifies, that I always plug that hungry little hole of his up until he's earned something even better. It comes out, slick and shiny and warmed from the heat of his body and smelling deliciously of him, and I lean in and instead press my lips to his slack, well-used hole.

He cries out, both disappointed at another delay and almost ecstatic at the new sensation, torn between raw need at _getting_ there, and helpless delight at how masterfully I'm drawing it out, driving him out of his mind with anticipation. I position the tip of my tongue against the slick pucker of muscle, and with a hand on his hip direct him to push back against it.

“Ah!” he cries out when my tongue breaches through the barrier. “Ah! Ah! Ah!”, mindless cries of pure lust as he's fucking himself open again on my tongue, his hands clawing at the sheets. I know he loves it, and I do this every time, to bind him to me even closer, but I never allow it for too long. It always smacks a little too much of him trying to gain the upper hand and go at his own pace. So after I've allowed him a few more self-administered thrusts, I withdraw, and with my other hand still around his cock, throbbing frantically under my fingers now but miraculously still holding out, I push him forward until his forehead bumps against the mattress and I'm finally, finally giving him my best gift, straight inside in one single swift plunge.

Even though we've been heading for this all along, he cries out at the sudden invasion, a cry of surrender if I ever heard one. He never has any energy left at this point to meet me thrust for thrust. All he can do is keep still and receive me, the muscles of his hole clenching around me erratically, whenever I draw back a little to gather momentum for the next thrust that lodges me even deeper in that dark cavern where it belongs, and where he needs it in order to be happy. I gather him up in my arms, and pull him back against my naked chest.  
  
“Touch yourself,” I whisper to him, and as if he's only been waiting for it, his hands – both his hands – fly to close around his own desperate erection.

“Just one,” I tell him.

“ _Please_ ,” he gasps, but I'm adamant.

“Close it around the tip. Stroke it.” He does, and I'm watching it over his shoulder, still rocking into him all the while. He obediently plays with the tip of his own cock, spreading the pre-come that's been leaking from it all around it. “Run your finger along the slit,” I order, and he does that, too, generating friction as he moans, another series of “aah!”s now, but sweet and low this time. “Now along the underside.” He uses his palm for that, not his fingers, and the moans get louder again. “Feel your balls,” and he cups them with his hand, feeling the strain and the weight of what's built up in there. It makes me feel drunk, how I can guide him with no more than my voice, keep him on the brink of orgasm for an hour if I want to, desperate to just let go but so well trained by now in accepting my control of his pleasure that he won't do it.

“And now come for me,” I tell him at last, when it's me who can't hold back any longer. And that's all it takes, just my voice, not even a touch. He cries out again, a long, ragged sound of relief, and then he's coming like he never did before, in thick spurts, endlessly, into the sheets under him, again and again and again as all the tension ebbs from his body and he goes as limp as a rag doll. He collapses onto his own mess with nothing to hold him up now but my hands on either side of his hips, keeping his arse raised while I'm still pushing, pumping, _heaving_ into it in my own slower rhythm until I, too, am spent.

\+ + +

None of this is real. None of it ever happens. And nothing even remotely resembling this ever happens. I put my cock up his arse, and then I watch him doing himself with his hands, but it's utterly different from my fantasies, because he still never, ever cedes control to me. He can moan and whisper dirty things to me all he wants, I know it's not real. I can make him hard and bring him to orgasm, but it never really touches him. There's not a square inch of his body, and no cavity, that I haven’t had access to, but I still never reach the core. He merely accepts it as if it's a service he's entitled to, or an indulgence that he condescends to grant _me_ now and again. No matter how deep I'm inside him, and how our sweat-slick bodies slide against each other, there's always that glass wall between us that I've always wanted but never managed to shatter, except in my dreams. 

It often makes me short-tempered with him now, particularly when he's in his worst princess mood. Sometimes I'm having trouble not punching him, when he’s being particularly bossy and difficult. And although it never occurs to me to cancel our appointments myself, or send him home when he's already there, sometimes now I think I'd rather be alone than having this big petulant spoiled child on my hands to keep satisfied, when all I really want is a bit of peace and quiet.

Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to push him away now, even when we're naked skin to naked skin and fused together at the hips. It's a healthy instinct, in fact it's a red flag. If only I'd acknowledge it, and could bring myself to act on it. But then, that's addiction for you.

“Jesus, not _now_ ,” I say into the dark night when he wakes me one early morning in December, spooning me from behind and dragging his already half-hard cock slowly along the crease of my arse, up and down. I've dreamed my favourite fantasy again – for the first time with his real, so very different self next to me in bed – and I'd really like to hang on to that a little longer.

“Why not?” he purrs, sneaking a hand around my hip to feel for my own very prominent morning erection. There's even a damp patch on the sheets again, dammit.

“Leave it,” I grumble, and roll over onto my front to get away from him. “Let me sleep.”

“Oh, sleep,” he scoffs, and nudges me in the side. “Who wants to sleep when there's a murder to be solved?”

That's got me instantly awake.

“ _What?”_

 _“_ Your phone rang,” he explains evenly. “You gave no sign that you'd be back among the living any time soon, so I took the liberty of answering it, since it came from a Met landline. There's a man lying dead in Kensington, a wife in hysterics, and they're sending a car which will be here in twenty minutes.”

I sit up, appalled. “So you figured we had at least fifteen left for another - “ I trail off, unable to believe such cold-bloodedness.

“ - fuck,” he supplies helpfully. “As a matter of fact, no. But I know what triggers to use to get you awake quickly.”

Without waiting for an answer, he swings his leg down off the bed, gets up and starts dressing in yesterday's clothes.

“What, you're coming?” I ask stupidly.

“Of course.”

He finishes doing up the buttons of his shirt, then makes as if to leave for the bathroom.

“Wait,” I tell him.

“What?”

I draw myself up and square my shoulders. I may not look very impressive, sitting in bed naked and bleary-eyed, but I do my best. “We agreed, ages ago. No crime solving under the influence.”

His eyes narrow. “Hypocrite,” he says then.

“I don't care. You're staying clean this morning, or you aren't coming. Nor ever again.”

He rolls his eyes. But then, miraculously, for once he does what he's told.

\+ + +

He's antsy in the police car, all the way from my home to the crime scene in Kensington. He's sweating, although it's not warm in the car. He's fidgeting for no apparent reason, and although he’s doing his best to hide it, he's trying to scratch his arms, too. Coke bugs, it flashes across my mind. Is it really so bad? _Of course it is_ , says that familiar voice in my head. _Just think of his constant nose-bleeds. He's been on the stuff again for weeks now, and you've_ _made sure he's never had more than a couple of days' pause between doses. If that. Can’t expect it not to show. You’re just usually not there when it does._

We get out of the police car together in a posh residential street in Kensington, in the still dark, quiet morning. Sally Donovan is at the front door, in conversation with the uniformed constable standing guard, and she raises her eyebrows when she sees us. He greets her with very falsely cheerful “good morning, sergeant”. She presses her lips together in response.

When we’re inside the house, we can hear the sound of a woman sobbing uncontrollably somewhere upstairs.

“The wife,” Sally says. “We’ve called their GP though, he’s with her.” She shows us into a room on the ground floor that seems to serve as a library, or study, or both. Bookshelves cover every wall from floor to ceiling, and in the centre of the room, there’s a massive, old-fashioned desk with an equally massive carved chair behind it. Slumped in the chair, with head and torso resting on the surface of the desk, is the body of an elderly man, white thinning hair falling over his wide-open eyes, one of his hands clutched to his chest, twisted into the fabric of the dressing gown he’s wearing. On the desk, amidst a mass of papers, both printouts and handwritten, there is a small silver tray with a half empty coffee cup on it.

“A night-owl,” Sally explains. “Used to stay up until all hours, apparently, writing his books.”

“What books?” I ask, rather inconsequentially, maybe because I’m still only half awake.

A corner of Sherlock’s mouth goes up. “Oh, Sergeant Donovan is an expert, it seems.” He turns to me. “Don’t tell me you missed the name on the doorbell?”

“Thomas Haywood?” I quote, as yet oblivious of its significance.

“High-end erotica, as his publisher would say. I'd call it a waste of paper with glossy black covers. Third rate smut with not even the excuse of a plot to string the porn scenes together. He churns out a book every half-year, sells millions of them, and _makes_ millions, too, apparently.” He picks up a computer printout, several pages, from the desk and scans it with a single glance. “This looks like a particularly fine example. Want a taste?”

And before Sally or I can protest, he starts reading from it, in an awful, breathy voice that makes me think of cheap phone sex. “’Isadora sighed ecstatically when he began caressing her milky-white, wide-spread thighs with his strong but gentle hands, exposing her flower-shaped, wetly glistening vulva to the view of the other robed and hooded men who stood in a semi-circle around the black marble altar. ‘Take me, Master, take me!’ she gasped, straining against the silken bonds around her wrists and ankles. ‘I offer you my body, in worship of - ‘”

“Stop it!” Sally interrupts him, so shrilly that it makes my ears ring. She looks revolted. “You – you freak! You utter _freak!_ ”

He lowers the papers and looks at her with a frown, as if he can’t see what’s got into her. “Anything wrong?” he asks calmly, thankfully back in his normal voice.

“It’s disgusting, _disgusting_!” Sally shrieks. She jerks the papers out of his hand, so forcefully that she almost tears them in half, and throws them back on the desk. “There’s a man lying _dead_ here, and all _you_ can think of it is filling our heads with _filthy_ – “

“Oh, not your thing after all, then?” he asks innocently. “I thought girls liked that sort of stuff.”

She’s speechless with indignation for a moment. Then her eyes narrow.

“What do _you_ know what girls like, anyway?” she spits at him.

“Sally,” I admonish her, but all it does is make her round on me.

“And you just standing there letting him!”

“Well, as opposed to _you_ ,” Sherlock points out, his voice sickly sweet, “the Inspector clearly acknowledges that there’s nothing wrong with paying one’s respects to one of the great writers of our nation by reciting from his works upon his demise.”

Sally takes another deep breath at that, ready to let fly again, when the door opens, and a short, roundish man in his fifties looks in, peering myopically through his glasses.

“Excuse me,” he says in a mild voice. “I was told the investigating officer had arrived?”

I give Sherlock and Sally a glare to share between them, and turn towards the man.

“Doctor McKenna,” he introduces himself to me. “I’m Mrs Haywood’s doctor, and her husband’s, for that matter.” He glances across at the lifeless body. “She was in a very bad way, and I’ve administered a sedative. But there seems to be something on her mind that she insists on telling you, and I believe that it would help to calm her down if you came and listened to her. Something to do with a will.”

“If you think it advisable, of course,” I agree. “Donovan, with me. Sherlock, stay here.”

Because if I leave those two alone in this room for even a minute, there’ll surely be a second corpse in it by the time I come back.

They both look unhappy with that arrangement, but I’m not going to give Sherlock the chance to throw a second woman in this house into hysterics. That consideration even outweighs leaving him alone at an as-yet-unprocessed crime scene. But Anderson and his team must be here any moment now anyway.

“And don’t you dare touch that coffee,” I tell him for good measure, which earns me a falsely reassuring grin from him, and a look of confusion closely followed by disgust from the doctor that would be comical if anyone in the room felt like laughing.

\+ + +

When Sally and I come back downstairs a few minutes later, it is with the information that, according to his wife, the deceased made a new will only a week ago. In it, he left a considerable part of his fortune to his private secretary - a single woman, as the widow takes care to point out to us, who is thirty-five years younger than him, and who was present in this house last night, typing the latest chapter of his new novel for him. Mrs Haywood assumes that the will is locked in the top drawer of her husband's desk, where he keeps all important documents.

When we re-enter the study where the body was found, a deceptively peaceful scene meets our eyes. Anderson and two of his colleagues are there, busy securing the evidence, and Sherlock is sitting on a sofa with his feet up on the coffee table and a sheaf of handwritten papers in his hand, quiet for once, absorbed in his reading. He glances up when the door opens to admit Sally and me.

“I take everything back,” he announces with an air of modesty, even contrition. It makes us both stare. “What I said was completely wrong. I take it back.” He holds up the manuscript. “There _is_ a plot. Quite a clever one, too. Isadora is actually an agent sent to infiltrate the Satanists’ network in order to - “

Sally abruptly turns to me. “Get him out of here _right now_ ,” she says in a surprisingly even voice, considering how her eyes are blazing.

“I didn’t ask him to come!” I protest, not even realising what I'm saying until it's too late. Her eyes narrow, first in confusion, then in suspicion. But before I can blunder on, Sherlock takes the matter out of my hands.

“Yes, well, she's right,” he says rather loudly, getting to his feet and putting the manuscript into the inner pocket of his coat. “Looks like there’s nothing left to do here.” He jerks his head at Anderson. “My assistant seems to have everything in hand, and the coffee is cold now anyway.” He catches my eye. “Good luck finding the will.”

There’s a secret little glint in his own eyes at that, but its significance escapes me entirely.

“Not your assistant!” Anderson calls after him indignantly, but he’s already gone.

Sally follows him out into the hall, as if to make sure that he’s really leaving, and not still lurking somewhere to spring more obscenities on us. I instruct Anderson to look specifically for a will, or any documents to do with inheritance, and to start with the desk drawers. Then I go to join Sally.

To my great consternation, I find her sitting on the lowest step of the stairs in the empty hall, with her face in her hands, her shoulders trembling. It’s unreal. Sally Donovan _never_ cries. The only time I ever saw her do it was over that dead baby, last year, and she - anyone - would have been a heartless monster not to. But now?

“Hey,” I say quietly, because she doesn’t seem to have heard me approach, my steps muffled by the thick carpet.

She raises her head then - and I almost take a step back at the look on her face. She’s not crying. But her face is frozen in a grimace of fury and despair, both in equal measure.

“What - “ I manage to get out, and then suddenly I've got it.

 _She_ _knows._

I open my mouth, but I don't know what to say.

She shakes her head, and there’s an undertone of true grief in her voice when she speaks. “Really, Greg? Him, of all people?”

“What are you talking about?” I make a lame, far-too-late and far-too-obvious attempt at deflecting the impending disaster.

She snorts contemptuously, and abruptly rises to her feet to face me.

“I'm not stupid, you know, no matter what he says. You arrive here together in the same car at five in the morning - “

\- and he, usually an epitome of sartorial perfection, in a rumpled suit and a crinkled shirt. And as if that wasn’t enough of a giveaway, I had to point out with extra care that I didn't stop at his place to pick him up, because apparently, he miraculously just happened to be around at my flat anyway in the middle of the night. We probably still _smell_ like it, too, having had no time to take a shower before we came here.

I can feel bile rise up in my throat, and I only just manage to swallow it down again. But somehow, I’m still lost for words. I should have had an emergency plan for this situation. It was waiting to happen, after all.

“And don’t tell me it’s none of my business,” Sally continues fiercely. “Because I can’t stand it anymore, Greg, I really can't. It’s bad enough when he ruins our cases, but I can’t just stand by and look on while he’s ruining your _life_.”

“Sally, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, don’t I?” she replies, a sharp, accusing tone in her voice now.

“Yes, you don’t!”

_Because if you were a man, Sally, and it was you he was taking up his arse, and you could feel him sweat and pant under you, clenching around you and anchoring you in that incredibly tight heat until you came so hard you saw stars, then you would maybe understand that there are things worth ruining your life for._

“I don’t care what it is you do with each other when nobody’s looking,” she snaps, as if she's read my thoughts. “I really couldn’t care less. But I can tell what it’s doing _to_ you. I know what it’s turned you into. You’re losing yourself, Greg! He’s making you into spineless pushover, the way he treats you, and me, and Philip and everyone else. And you just _let_ him! You stand there and _let_ him! What, what can _possibly_ justify that? He's _using_ you, that's all he's doing, and he doesn't care that he's completely messing you up in the process, because he _never_ cares, never, about anyone.” She breaks off and shakes her head again. “I can’t believe it took me so long to realise it, I don’t know how I could have been so blind!” Her voice grows louder again, and it takes on a venomous edge. “But that’s what he does, isn’t it? He blinds you, and when you’re properly dazzled, he'll latch onto you like a fucking _parasite,_ the sort that injects a paralytic when it starts sucking out your lifeblood, too, so you don’t even realise that’s what he’s doing!”

“Sally!” I bark at her, not because what she says isn’t true - oh, dear God, it is, it _is_ \- but she's giving me a headache on top of the sleep deprivation, and it isn’t helping. “It’s not as simple as that, and this is neither the place nor the time to - “

Anderson choses that moment to stick his head out of the door to the study. “There’s no will in any of the desk drawers,” he says, studiously ignoring our flushed faces. “But the lock on the topmost one has clearly been tampered with. We’ve dusted it for fingerprints, and we’ve got a few good samples for the lab.”

There's a moment of silence while I process that information. _Good luck finding the will_ , I can hear his voice in my head. And now I know what that glint in his eye meant.

It's the proverbial last straw, the one that breaks the camel’s back.

I snap.

\+ + +

It’s a short trip from the Haywoods’ house in Kensington to Montague Street in the early hours of Sunday morning. In no time, I’m at the house he lives in, and up the stairs to his second floor flat two at a time, without stopping to wonder why the doors are unlocked.

He’s sitting at his desk with his back to me when I enter, visible only in silhouette against the dim light from the desk lamp.

“You were quick,” he comments without turning round when I slam the door closed behind me, and experimentally holds up two pieces of paper so the light shines through the handwriting on them. “I’m nearly done, though. Quite clearly this is - “

“ - his will,” I say, approaching him with determined steps until I'm right behind him. “The will he was probably killed over, and that _you_ stole from his desk, without even bothering to avoid fingerprints.”

He turns in his chair and looks up at me with an appreciative grin. “I said you were quick.”

He doesn’t know the half of it.

In a moment, I’ve got him by the front of his jacket, yank him upright, and smash my forehead straight into his smirking face. It sends him staggering backwards against his chair, off-balance, and I follow the head-butt up with a right hook that goes astray and a left hook that lands square on his nose. His head jerks back, spraying blood. With surprise still on my side, I grab him again, swing him around, and trip him up. He drops on the moth-eaten carpet with a strangled sound of protest, but either he’s not making a real effort, or something else is slowing him down, because he isn’t even halfway up again by the time I lock my arms around his chest, heave him up and dump him across the littered coffee table in front of the sofa. He lands face down, spattering blood all over a stack of old newspapers when his head bumps onto it. I grab him by the wrist and twist his arm behind his back. He lets out something between a curse and a sob, and tries to pull away.

“Stop wriggling,” I snap at him. “Or you’ll be doing this in handcuffs.”

When my warning has no effect, I dig them out of the inner pocket of my jacket. A moment and another fierce struggle later, they’re on him, trapping his hands behind his back and leaving both of mine free. Keeping him down with one hand - I know how to do this, I’m a professional after all - I use my other to fumble with button and zip until I’ve got them open, first mine and then his.

When he feels what I’m doing, he freezes. His battered body is coiled like a spring, but he makes no attempt to stop me when I push his jacket and shirt up, and drag down his trousers and pants. I go through the pockets of his jacket for something to ease the way, although I’m not sure he deserves it. When I’ve found it, I lean on him with my full weight to keep him down while I slick myself up one-handed. With my chest pressed to his back, I can feel his heart beating madly, a wild animal trapped. And doomed, and knowing it.

I hook my hands around his thighs and pull them apart, to make sure he keeps them nicely spread for me. Then I position myself, and I can feel him take a deep breath. But there’s nothing more, no warning, no protest, no plea. And there better hadn’t be, because I’m sick and tired of playing his games. Now he'll be playing mine.

And then that's what he's doing, whether he likes it or not.

He’s tense as a bowstring, and I can tell that he's fighting not me now but his own body’s reflexes, determined to meet my red-hot rage with lofty, cold contempt. But as I'm breaking through his resistance, I can feel his instincts of self-preservation kick in with full force. He subdues them ruthlessly, desperate to keep up his pretence at noble stoicism. But I can feel him wince as I’m pressing into him, much too hard, too rough and too fast.

When I’m buried inside him to the hilt, I pause to glance at his hands in their bonds. I’ve never taken him from behind before, never in reality, nor with his hands tied, and he hates it, oh dear God how he hates it. He has his fingers curled into fists, and his nails are digging so hard into his palms that they’re leaving deep, deep marks.

_Well, this is what it’s like to be used, princess. It was high time someone taught you that lesson._

I start moving, and soon I'm rutting into his unresponsive body with a force that knocks him into the edge of the coffee table at every thrust, his hipbones surely black and blue tomorrow. He's turned his face sideways so he can breathe, and it scrapes across the litter on the table, back and forth, back and forth in the merciless rhythm that I'm giving him. There’s not the least evidence of any excitement on his part, of course, with no chemical catalyst to get him in the mood this time, and with barely anything to take the edge off the pain. And I'm not deluded enough to expect any. But his passivity is a turn-on, as much as a provocation. It's cruel, it's wrong, but it's glorious to be the one in total control at last, me in charge and he deferring to me for once, instead of I to him, as I’ve done far too often.

Two or three more thrusts, and I come, spurting into him with reckless abandon, filling his disheveled body to the brim.

When I’m done, I pull out of him, wipe myself clean on his crumpled shirttails, and get to my feet. He neither moves nor speaks, except to let out one long, carefully controlled breath. I can't see much of his face because his hair has fallen over it, but I let my eyes travel over his heaving sides, over the scratch marks on his bare, exposed back, over the bruises already forming around his tethered wrists, and over the insides of his thighs that are glistening with sweat and lube and my come dribbling back out of him.

He's easily more beautiful like this than I've ever seen him before.

I resist the urge to tell him so, because isn't that just the last thing he deserves to hear right now? Instead, I walk over to his desk. I make myself comfortable in his chair, light a cigarette, and then pick up the documents he's been studying. One is the manuscript of a part of Haywood's latest book - the same that I saw Sherlock pocket back at the writer's house. The other is, just as clearly, the man’s handwritten new will, dated last Tuesday, appointing his wife and the children from his first and second marriages as his heirs, but also leaving a sum of money that makes my jaw drop to one Vicky O'Neill, his secretary.

I take my time reading through it. He stays where I left him, still silent and motionless. When I’m done, I stub out my cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, fold the papers up and put them in my own pocket.

“Well, thank you for finding it for us,” I say, making my voice drip with sarcasm. “And next time you get an urge to steal evidence from us, I assure you I'll bring the whole team to watch while you're getting your reward.”

No response.

“Alright, you can go and clean yourself up now.” I take out the key to the handcuffs. “And since you like playing with locks so much, here's a little challenge. Just so you don't get bored when I'm gone.” I toss the key on the coffee table. It lands so close to his face that he flinches.

But he still makes no reply, so I turn on my heel and stride towards the door. I can hear him shift behind me then, and when my hand is on the doorknob, he speaks up.

“Wait,” he says, his voice low and hoarse. “Before you make another mistake – “ He breaks off to clear his throat. “The will. It's a fake.”

I swivel back towards him. He’s still on his knees, but he’s pushed himself back and raised his head so I can see his face. The blood is drying in crusts around his swollen nose, and there are dark smudges of printer’s ink on the right side of his face from his newspaper pillow. His eyes are huge in his battered face, huge and… empty, looking straight through me.

“What did you say?”

“It's a fake,” he repeats, and his eyes close as he frowns in concentration, as if he's having trouble collecting his thoughts. “Compare it with his handwriting on the manuscript. The Ds, the Ts, the Ys. All wrong. She killed him. And prepared this beforehand, to cast suspicion on the secretary.”

“What? Why?”

His eyes pop open again, and now he _is_ looking at me.

“Adultery, Lestrade,” he says in an endlessly weary, resigned voice. “Makes people do the strangest things. As I told you before.”

\+ + +

 


	7. Chapter 7

I stop for a quick coffee and a bite for breakfast on my way back to NSY. It’s still early, but the coffee shop is packed already with people on their way to work.

You’d think that when you’ve done what I’ve just done, you’ve got that branded on your forehead, for everyone you meet to see, and to recoil from, and to point their fingers at. But it isn’t the case. Either I’m becoming a very accomplished dissembler now, too - which wouldn’t be surprising, since I learned from the best - or I’m being presented with an excellent example of why it’s so difficult to pick a wrongdoer from a crowd of decent people, when they all essentially look the same. The girl behind the counter who takes my order smiles at me. The man in the suit that I bump into accidentally when I take my tray to a free table smiles at me. The lady I’m holding the door open for when we happen to leave at the same time smiles at me. How can they _not_ tell? How can it _not_ show?

Back at the office, I put Haywood’s papers in a plain envelope – no point in bothering with evidence bags now - and put it in Anderson’s pigeonhole, together with a note to get it to a graphologist as soon as possible.

On my own desk, there’s a note to say that Sally Donovan has reported sick.

I busy myself with mindless paperwork then, because whenever I pick up anything to do with Thomas Haywood, my brain seems to go off duty, too.

I had no trouble getting my breakfast down, but by lunchtime, I’m anything but hungry. The air in my office seems unbearably dense and stuffy, and when I go and get my third coffee, it leaves a vile taste in my mouth.

I get an email from Sally then, from her private account, short and to the point and icily impersonal. She says she’ll be back to work on Wednesday, but the first thing she’ll do then is ask the Superintendent for a transfer. Because she’s always liked working in Traffic, where she started her career, and she’s been toying with the idea of going back there for a while now. The first part of that sentence is a blatant lie, but the second half is probably quite true. _Congratulations, Greg._

I’m starting to feel downright dizzy. I manage to make it into the gents down the corridor, but only just.

There is some poetic justice in it that I get to suffer through my own comedown now, my clammy hands gripping the rim of the toilet bowl while the world is spinning around me. I get rid of everything I’ve eaten and drunk in the past hours, in a long series of almost painful convulsions. They leave me trembling with exhaustion, and feeling more miserable than words can express.

At long last, when even the dry retching has subsided, I get back on my feet, steadying myself against the wall of the cubicle. Then I make my way to the washbasin to clean my face and rinse my mouth.

Just then, the door bangs open, and Gregson comes striding in.

“Oh dear me,” he intones in comically exaggerated concern when he sees me. “You sure you’re alright?”

“Perfectly,” I snap at him, wiping my face on a paper towel. “And now excuse me, I’ve got some urgent work to do.”

Because I have. Exhaustion, weakness, anxiety, fatigue, pain, nausea and vomiting. Not exactly the symptoms you should leave someone to their own devices with. At the very least, you don't leave someone alone to crash from cocaine in handcuffs. It’s _dangerous_ , if nothing else.

The obvious option, the _right thing to do_ \- go straight back, check on him, make sure he’s at least half-way alright, physically, and call an ambulance if he isn't - I can’t bring myself to face.

But there’s an arsenal of more convenient instruments that I can use to find out if something's happened, and I'm already going through them in my mind. Search for his name in the databases - every database we have. Go through the lists we get from London’s A&Es. Go through the list of arrests - though I’m not sure why, because if anyone should be on it, it’s _me_ , not him. There’s a plain and very ugly legal term for what I’ve just done, after all. Go through the list of unidentified corpses, then, although I know for a fact that there's been none since the day before yesterday. (I'm the one who gets the automatic alerts for those, after all.)

I seriously consider sending a patrol of uniformed colleagues to his place on a pretext. But if he’s not alright, if he’s still there how I left him, that would mean an enquiry, whether he wants it or not. And the only reason why I'm not arrested already is his goddamn stubborn pride, after all, so I can leave him at least that, can’t I?

My salvation is already sitting there waiting on my computer screen when I return to my office. It's an email notification, saying that there’s been an update to a website I’m subscribed to. I click on the link with trembling fingers, and I discover that there have been five new samples added to that already impressive – and ever so slightly ridiculous - analysis of two hundred and thirty-eight different types of tobacco ash, complete with pictures and detailed scientific descriptions. It’s all I need to know. There _are_ limits to what you can do with your hands tied behind your back, after all.

I’m light-headed with relief for a moment, and I lean back in my chair and close my eyes. But it's short-lived, because a number of things become clear to me at that point, things that I should have seen long ago. Some of those, I missed because I was too caught up in my own rage and grief. Some of those, he very carefully hid from me. And to some, I closed my eyes deliberately. Well, that at least is over now.

Firstly - whatever it was between us, it wasn’t about sex. Sure, he’s an attractive man, and it wasn’t exactly a hardship to say yes when he asked (or didn’t ask, because he _didn't_ , that first night back in October that started the whole downward spiral). But that’s not what it was about. I should have known that straight from the word go. He never made a secret of it that he was high every time he slept with me, but I never stopped to think what that really meant. Loosening up a bit to feel more confident is one thing; but artificially creating an urge that isn’t really there in the first place is another thing entirely. I see that now. God, why only now?

So, secondly - if it wasn’t about sex, why else would you want to go to bed with someone? Simply because _It is not good that man should be alone,_ as it says in Scripture. But of course, he couldn’t just say that. He could never just ask someone to be his friend, because if you never ask, they can never say “no”, can they? So he made sure it looked like he was after something else entirely, and he found me willing to offer him a bit of closeness exactly _because_ it seemed so casual, with no true commitment offered or expected, and no strings attached. Except that was a big, big lie, and I fell for it like a fool.

Thirdly - all the provocations, all the manipulation, all the mind games, every instance when he drove me up the wall and brought me to the end of my tether over the past months – including what happened this morning - were a test. A test of how far he could trust me. And what have I done? I am, for all I know, the only person he’s ever thought worthy of taking that test, and I have utterly failed to pass it. He’s put his soul into my hands, a fragile little bird barely yet capable of flying. And I’ve crushed it.

All in one go, I’ve managed to lose everyone who mattered to me. I’ve lost my wife, I’ve lost my best and most esteemed colleague, I’ve lost the most valuable asset in the fight against crime that the Met has ever had at its disposal, and I’ve lost a friend I didn’t even know I had.

I’m glad Sally isn’t here anymore to see it, because Greg Lestrade never cries, either. Except when he does.

\+ + +

To say that my epiphany on that day worked like a cold shower on a winter morning would be a gross understatement.

It makes me feel like I've been chewed up, swallowed down and then spit out again, left to reassemble myself as best I can. And that's what I do.

The first thing to go are the cigarettes. They're not a big deal, compared to everything else that's gone wrong in my life, but they're easiest to let go of. And it's good to have something tangible, something symbolic to cling to, to assure myself that everything will change for the better from now on.

I'm not late to work again anymore, either. I don't have my eyes riveted to the screen of my phone throughout meetings anymore. I concentrate on what I'm being paid for doing, and what I've always loved doing (because, you know, the pay is actually lousy).

And of course, I never give my colleagues a hard time anymore by exposing them to constant ridicule from the rudest person that ever walked in England's green and pleasant land.

But strangely, and quite frustratingly, nobody seems to notice. I'm like the boy who cried wolf – I'm really serious about it this time, but nobody is listening anymore.

Sally cold-shoulders me in a way I wouldn't have thought her capable of, not after three years of working together as closely as we were used to doing. When she's back on Wednesday, after her talk with the Superintendent, she informs me crisply that Traffic is overstaffed at the moment and there won't be a vacancy for her until someone goes on maternity leave in February, but she _will_ be transferring then.

And then she returns to her own desk without even giving me the chance to express my regrets, because she clearly wouldn’t believe they were real, anyway.

Over the following weeks, everything is outwardly business as usual, but nobody's heart is in it any more.

Sally actually spends a lot of time texting someone now, too, but she limits herself to doing it during breaks, and when she thinks I'm not looking. Well, I can't expect her to share details about her private life with me anymore, even if they’re good news.

Anderson, on the other hand, is being downright evasive. Whenever we communicate now, he's - uncharacteristically - trying to keep it short, and whenever we're face to face, it's as if he's avoiding my eyes. But then, he probably heard a good deal of what Sally threw in my face back at the Haywoods' house, and guessed all the rest, so no surprise that he's disgusted with me, too.

But I'd never been aware of how much of their respect for me was for me as a person, rather than for my rank and my position. So I'd never have thought how much it would hurt to lose it.

Some of their behaviour explains itself when I walk in on them one day, around the corner of a corridor. They're locked in a passionate embrace that would be completely out of order for two police officers on duty even if Philip Anderson didn’t happen to be married to another woman. But who am I to tell them so? I've always prided myself on being someone who leads by example. I shouldn't be surprised now at the result.

\+ + +

Christmas approaches, and I'm about to volunteer for duty over the holidays. Not because I'm hoping to get back into anyone's good books that way - that ship has truly sailed – but simply because it'll be easier to survive those days if I'm busy. But just then, an invitation arrives from my brother Mark to spend Christmas with him and his family.

Mark sounds surprised on the phone when I accept it just for myself – he has no clue yet what happened between Cathy and me – but he doesn't comment, bless him. And so I unexpectedly end up spending Christmas Day not on the streets of London, but overlooking the grey and wintery Bristol Channel. I play Wii Sports with Mark's teenage sons until we drop (don't laugh – according to them, I make their dad “look like a tosser”), and then we all binge-watch old Star Trek episodes together until Mark's wife threatens to pull the plug. The whole normalcy of it is therapeutic.

We never talk about Cathy, until late that night when Mark and I are alone in the living room at last. This part of the evening is more painful than therapeutic, but I owe Mark that portion of the truth, at least. And it also prepares him for what happens then, shortly after midnight, when my phone rings. I've put it on the table, so when the screen lights up with the caller ID, we both immediately see who it is. But I make no move to pick it up.

“I think you should,” Mark says quietly.

“I don't want to.”

It keeps ringing.

Just before it diverts to voice-mail, I pick it up after all.

“Greg,” she says without preamble, her voice strangely thick, as if she has a bad cold. “I love you.”

I can feel something tighten in my chest. “I’m not ready for more lies, Cathy.”

“No lies,” she says, slurring her words, and I realise that she doesn't have a cold. She's drunk. “No lies. 'S true. I love you.”

I'm silent.

“He's - he’s - “ She breaks off to take a deep breath before she continues, her voice even unsteadier than before. “He's much better in bed than you, you know... much more imagy - imaginny - imaginative... but he's an arsehole, otherwise.”

What am I supposed to say to _that?_

“It's over,” she says then, and makes a noise like a sob. “I never wanna see him again. Never ever ever ag- “

“Where are you, Cathy?” I interrupt her, suddenly realising the implications. “Where are you right now?” I strain my ears for any background noises that could tell me – pub? car? street? - but I can hear none.

“What?” she replies, oblivious to my alarm. “Oh, don't worry... I’m somewhere lonely. Where are _you_?”

“Cathy!” I almost shout into the phone. “Where – are – you?”

This has little to do with her being my wife. It's gut instinct and professional experience combined, and it’s got all the bells ringing. An attractive woman, out alone, on Christmas night, dead drunk, unstable both in mind and in body, utterly vulnerable – we've picked enough of them out of the gutter (some still alive, some not) to know what can happen to them in a city like London. It makes my blood run cold.

“Miss you,” she slurs. “Happy Christmas, Greg.” And then there's a click, and she's hung up.

I'm in no state to think as clearly as I need to, so it's Mark who gets behind the wheel there and then, and drives us all the one hundred and fifty miles back to London.

He drops me off at the office and continues to wait at my place, while I put my arsenal to the task, in earnest this time.

The databases – nothing. The A&E lists – endless, as befits the peaceful nature of the season, but no one resembling her. Arrests – a fair number, but clearly not her, either. Unidentified corpses – two, but both male. ( _Have fun, Sally,_ a nasty little voice says in my head, before I swat that thought away.) To trace her phone, I'd need a court order, and I'm trying to think up a pretext how to get one when my own phone rings again. It's Mark.

“I'm at your home now, Greg,” he says. “She's here.”

\+ + +

We do it in small steps.

She doesn't move straight back in. For the time being, she stays at the little place Martin found for her back in November, although the extra rent is a strain on our resources. But neither of us wants to ruin things by going too fast.

We meet up almost every night after work though, on neutral ground at first, mostly for dinner, or for a movie, and sometimes even just for a long walk along the river in the dark.

She threads her hand under my arm one of those nights, after about a week, to keep us close together for warmth. When we're on Westminster Bridge looking over the sparkling lights of the city, she turns up her face to mine for a kiss.

I give her a peck on the cheek instead. “Sorry,” I say as gently as I can, because it's much less to do with her than with me. “Not yet.”

“It's fine,” she says in a surprisingly steady voice, and gives my arm a reassuring squeeze.

I don't quite buy her story, that the reason why she left Martin was that he was only after her money. Sure, it's plausible that he should have lost his bank a lot of money in some illicit speculations that they're claiming back from him now, and that he should have remembered, from their school days together, that she's the single child of a well-to-do businessman who’d easily be able to bail him out. But who am I to think I have a right to the whole truth, when she doesn't even have the slightest idea what I've been up to behind _her_ back while she was away? I'm a bit sorry for her, even, because she must put down my reluctance to touch or kiss her to me being still angry and disappointed with _her_. But I don't see how I can tell her the truth without alienating her completely and forever.

By the new year, she's a regular visitor in her own old home again, and it feels almost normal how we're spending our evenings together there, eating takeaway at the kitchen table, watching telly, chatting about work. Some days, when something’s held me up at the office and I’m later than I meant to be, I find her curled up on the sofa, absorbed in some magazine, deliberately and very sweetly not minding to be kept waiting. Soon, it starts feeling very strange when she gets up yawning at the end of the evening, ready for me to drive her back, to sleep at her new place.

It's the middle of January when I ask her to stay. She insists on sleeping on the sofa. I keep myself awake reading until I'm sure she's asleep, then tip-toe back to the living room, pick her up in my arms – Christ, I used to be much fitter – and carry her to our bed where she belongs. She instinctively slings her arms around my neck when I lower her onto the soft mattress, and mutters something indistinct in her sleep. I cover her up carefully, then go to take her place on the sofa. It feels much more right this way round.

January 27 th  happens to be an anniversary for us. Fifteen years since we first met. We go out for dinner, and when we get back home, a little tipsy from too much wine, she stops on the stairs ahead of me, turns, puts her hands on my shoulders – we're of a height, like this – and kisses me bang on the mouth. Our lips never stop touching then, until we've arrived at our bed, she walking backwards all the way and giggling madly, and I with no intention this time of chastely retreating to the sofa. But taking it slowly has been our motto for a month now, so taking it slowly is the order of the day, too.

Even minutes later, I'm only just about to sneak my hands under her blouse, to caress her small firm breasts and run my palms reverently over her incredibly soft skin while she stretches out on the bed with a contented sigh. It’s like a dream. I have no idea how I have deserved this, but it is like coming home.

But just then, like a rude reminder that this is not for me – at least not yet, not until I've fixed some other things that are still waiting to be fixed - my phone rings, and Sally Donovan's voice jerks me back to reality.

“There's been another one.”

Half an hour later, we're facing each other over the body of Beth Davenport, Junior Minister for Transport, lying on a building site, with a little empty glass bottle clutched in her stiffening hand, exactly like the ones that were found on Sir Jeffrey Patterson and James Phillimore.

Sally takes a deep breath, as if steeling herself for battle. “Call him,” she says.

By silent consent, neither of us has ever so much as mentioned his name again, after the Haywood case. What she's offering me now is beyond generous. But it's too late.

“I can't,” I reply.

She gives me a hard look. “Yes, you can.”

“Even if I do, he won't come.”

“Try it,” she insists. “This has got to stop.”

“Try it yourself.”

“Greg.”

She holds my gaze with an intensity that’s almost too hard to bear. I can see steely determination in her eyes, that fierce sense of duty that puts every personal consideration second to getting the job done. But I can also see rising fear, if not panic, ruthlessly suppressed as yet, but fighting to make itself known. As it will, if we don't manage to put an end to these deaths. And that’s something we can’t let happen.

Eventually, I lower my head, and nod.

I’ve had over a month of grace, but that’s over now. I knew I was never going to get away without doing proper penance, and this is where it starts. I owe it to her as much as I owe it to him.

\+ + +

I try his mobile - it just rings out. I send him an email - no reply. The next morning, I go to find him at home - but the windows are dark, the door is locked, and nobody answers the bell.

I check his website then, for the first time since the day Thomas Haywood died. (Did I mention that his wife confessed immediately, when we confronted her with our suspicions that she faked his will?) I leave a note there, and finally there’s a reply, but not until a day later, on the afternoon of the 29 th , and it’s not what I was hoping for.

_Busy._

_Busy with bloody what?_ I’m about to ask back, but just then, Gregson pokes his head in at the door.

“Oh, you’re in,” he says, as if that’s a surprise. “Got a minute? Just wanted to let you know - I’ve been borrowing your sniffer dog. Bit rude without asking you first, I know, sorry about that.” He smiles apologetically. “Just wanted to say - he was fantastic, absolutely fantastic.” He kisses his fingers, like a French pastry chef advertising a delicious new creation. “High-end, that boy, absolutely high-end. Five minutes into it, I knew I was in for the ride of my life. Just watching him at it is pure pleasure. I totally see why you’re keeping him as a pet.”

I gape at him, unable to fathom what the _fuck_ he's telling me. Images flash across my mind - Sherlock, naked in bed, and Gregson - what, _Gregson?_ Gregson, ten years older than me, paunchy and balding? _‘Busy’?_

When Gregson sees the stumped expression on my face, he laughs. “Sorry! I’m prattling. Remember the Downing case that had me so baffled? Last month, drowned in the garden pond, no reason why he should have? Your boy takes one look at the scene, and there you go.” He fishes out his phone and holds it out to me, quoting. “’If brother has green ladder, arrest brother.’ Of course the brother had a green ladder. We’ve just arrested him. He’s confessed.”

“Oh, good,” I manage to get out then, feeling abysmally stupid.

“And now I’ve got another tricky one he might be able to help me with,” he continues. “If we can disprove an ex-husband’s alibi, I think we’ve got a good chance to - “

“It’s alright,” I cut him short. “No need to ask me. But if you don’t mind, I’ve got a press conference to get ready for now.”

He pulls a sympathetic face. “Yeah, right, I forgot. The serial suicides, right? No lead yet?”

I have no intention whatsoever of explaining to him why exactly my sniffer dog no longer takes _me_ on rides of any sort, so I just shake my head.

Half an hour later, I’m in our conference room, sitting at the head table with a face like a thundercloud, wishing I was a thousand miles away, while Sally Donovan is addressing a crowd of reporters. She speaks with her voice raised to carry across the room, barely needing the microphone, confidence and competence personified. She's doing a fantastic job of representing us like she always does in situations like that. I hate them, but she thrives on them. I can’t imagine what work will be like in a few days, when she’s left. I’ll miss her more than I’d have thought possible.

And there we are already, on the first question.

“Detective Inspector, how can suicides be linked?”

As expected, the next ten minutes are like drawing teeth, and they descend into a root canal treatment without anaesthetics when out of nowhere, everybody’s mobile phone beeps a text alert simultaneously.

Sally's got the situation under control again in no time, at least outwardly, but even she can't undo the damage. I'm not helping at all, quite the contrary, and we end with the certainty that I'll have my face all over the papers tomorrow morning, with the fantastically useful and very reassuring advice to the general public that all they have to do to keep themselves safe is not to commit suicide.

“Well, it's true, technically!” I defend myself when we're on our way back to our offices. “What did they expect me to say?”

Sally is fuming, but she's angrier with our uninvited contributor than at my blunders. “You said it was no use trying to call him in. What’s going on now?”

_Revenge, Sally. He’s taking his revenge._

I shake my head, and leave it at that.

“Well, what _did_ he say about Beth Davenport?” Sally insists.

“Nothing. ’Busy.’”

She rolls her eyes. “But not too busy apparently to take the piss out of us for sport! You’ve got to stop him doing that. He’s making us look like idiots.”

“Well, if you can tell me how he does it, I’ll stop him!”

By the time I'm back at my desk, he's added a few more “WRONG”s to his website, too, for good measure. I shout back at him in Caps Lock, but there is no response.

\+ + +

“What are you doing?” Sally asks when only a day later, we're beside yet another corpse featuring the same pattern that we know so well by now, and I take out my phone.

“Calling him, of course.”

“No,” she says.

I look up at her in surprise. “What?”

“I said no,” she repeats frostily.

“Sally, what? Only three days ago _you_ were the one who told me - “

“And what good did that do?” she snaps, right as usual. “You offered him exactly the sort of case that you keep telling me he's best at, and what does he do? He doesn't lift a finger to help, and instead makes us the laughing-stock of the nation! Just how much more of this are _you_ ready to take?”

_As much as it needs. He didn’t ask me for quarter, so how can I now ask him?_

“Says who?” I snarl back at Sally. As always, feeling cornered makes me lash out.

“What?”

“Well, it’s _you_ who’s gonna leave me in the lurch the day after tomorrow, isn’t it, with a serial killer on the loose and a fresh corpse every three days now!”

She sucks in a sharp breath in indignation, but she doesn't deign to reply. There's a moment of silence.

“Sorry,” I say then.

“It's alright,” she says stiffly.

Another silence.

“Let me call him, Sally. Just one more try.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“No. He's had his chance.”

It's true. But I haven't.

\+ + +


	8. Chapter 8

At Montague Street, someone buzzes me in, and I take the stairs two at a time. The door to the second floor flat is ajar, and there's an elderly couple in there - a fat lady with tightly curled hair and a small, wizened man with a pinched face. They seem to be busy packing – throwing, rather – clutter into cardboard boxes. The room is already half empty.

“Yes?” the man snaps at me sourly.

“Sherlock Holmes?”

“No longer here,” he grunts, and returns to his task.

“He moved out, you mean?”

The man gestures around the room. “Looks like it, don't it?”

This doesn't make any sense. _You know where to find me_ was the last message I got from him, at that awful press conference, only twenty-four hours ago.

“Did he leave a new address?”

The man shoots me a suspicious look. “Don't see how that's any of your business.”

Friendly small-talk will get me nowhere here. I take out the ID card that identifies me as a member of the Metropolitan Police Service, and shove it under his pointed nose.

It fails to make the intended impression. “Ah,” he says, not surprised in the least. “I thought so. Well, proves me right, don't it?”

“The address, please.”

The man looks across at his wife, and she shakes her head, as if I'm imposing some intolerable hardship on her by requesting her to shuffle across the entire room to her handbag that's sitting on the - now empty - coffee table.

I make sure I look anywhere but at that piece of furniture, until she returns with a crumpled piece of paper. She wordlessly hands it to her husband, and he reads it out to me.

“Two two one B Baker Street, W1.”

“Thank you.” They've already turned away from me again. “Anything happen?” I add then in a studiously casual tone, unable to stop myself.

“Oh, not at all,” the man snorts. “Just human fingers in the bin, the kitchen table on fire, and something nasty dripping through the floorboards into the flat below, all on the same day.”

It really shouldn't be, but that piece of information is wonderfully reassuring.

\+ + +

I've lost enough time as it is, so when I'm back in the car, I tell the driver to get us to Baker Street under blues and twos. When I try the door of No. 221, it’s unlocked, and there are voices coming from upstairs. I make my way to the first floor, and step into a spacious living room, full of half-unpacked boxes.

I haven’t prepared a speech or anything - I’m never good at that sort of thing - but I’m ready for anything from icy contempt to white-hot rage, and willing to take either.

His reaction when he sees me is completely like him and yet so unexpected that it stumps me.

“Where?” is all he asks, even before I can open my mouth. He's all focused and alert and ready to spring - much _more_ so, in fact, than I've seen him in months.

“Brixton, Lauriston Gardens,” I gratefully restrict myself to the bare facts. I couldn't trust my voice with more right now.

“What’s new about this one? You wouldn’t have come to get me if there wasn’t something different.”

There we are, tossing data back and forth just like in the good old times, before everything went to hell in a hand basket. Can it really be that he's missed it, too?

“You know how they never leave notes?”

“Yeah.”

“This one did.” A beat. “Will you come?”

And the miracle happens. He'd have every right in the world to tell me to go to hell, but he doesn't do it.

“Who’s on forensics?”

Ah. Of course, just 'yes' or 'no' has always been too simple for him.

“It’s Anderson.” My voice is pure apology.

He grimaces. “Anderson won’t work with me.”

“Well, he won’t be your assistant.”

“I need an assistant.”

And where did _that_ come from? But no time to wonder. “Will you come?” I ask again, still unable to believe that he might.

“Not in a police car. I’ll be right behind.”

Look, now he's even sparing Sally Donovan's feelings. This is unbelievable. I'm so relieved, I practically sketch him a bow. “Thank you.”

Only now, it registers with me that he’s not alone. There are two more people there in the room with him, a man and a woman, over by the fireplace. I give them a glance before departing, and a nod by way of belated greeting. The new landlady and her son, maybe? Same colouring, same modest height... But then I dismiss them from my mind again immediately. What significance could _they_ possibly have?

\+ + +

He's not alone when he arrives at the house in Brixton either, and at first, I don't realise that his companion is the man I saw at his flat.

“Who’s this?” I ask.

“He’s with me.”

Oh, _that_ was specific. “But who is he?”

“I said he’s with me,” he snaps back in a tone that bodes no opposition, and forbids any further enquiries.

It will take me the rest of the evening to figure out just what that means.

**\+ + +**

Right now, I take my lead from him, and restrict myself firmly to the matter at hand. A crime scene, with a dozen officers milling around the house, is the wrong place to have a quiet heart to heart anyway, even if he were the type to ever have heart to hearts with anyone. But there is something odd, something unreal about us trudging up the stairs on the way to the body, as if we’re acting according to a script, doing our best to play the parts of Greg Lestrade and Sherlock Holmes as the world used to know us. I’m certainly overdoing the gruffness, in my eagerness to be myself.

The strange feeling intensifies when we enter the room with the body, and he just stands there for a moment taking it in. Maybe it's the creepy atmosphere of the deserted house, with its decayed grandeur, its peeling wallpaper and dilapidated walls. As if someone's created it specifically as a fitting backdrop for us two, as the perfect illustration for everything we've -

“Shut up,” he snaps at me.

“I didn't say anything!”

“You were thinking. It's annoying.”

Caught in the act.

I was wrong about acting. He isn’t. On the contrary, he seems to have no trouble at all getting back into our old routine. I stand well back with my arms crossed, and watch him apply himself to the problem as if nothing had ever happened. By rights, he should be afraid of even being in the same room with me. But he seems to actually enjoy himself. _Can someone read me that riddle, please?_

Eventually, he turns to Mr He's With Me and says something quite intriguing.

“Doctor Watson, what do you think?”

“Of the message?” his guest replies, nodding at the letters scratched on the floorboards.

“Of the body. You’re a medical man.”

Now isn’t _that_ interesting?

“Wait, no,” I intervene almost automatically. “We have a whole team right outside.”

“They won’t work with me.”

 _But this one will?_ “I’m breaking every rule letting you in here - “

“Yes,” he states a simple truth. “Because you need me.”

Caught, again.

The look he gives me is pure challenge, but of course I'm no match for him. Never have been, never will be. I lower my eyes.

“Yes, I do. God help me.”

The air in the room is suddenly too thin to breathe, so I step outside for a moment.

\+ + +

At first, I watch him and his new companion interact with mixed feelings. He’s clearly got himself a fan, an admirer, one who asks all the right questions and gives him all the right cues so he can shine, the way only he can. Someone else he's dazzled and ensnared, then, someone else who's already besotted with him, infatuated, brainwashed, remote-controlled, just like -

My eyes have travelled down to the pink-clad dead woman on the wooden floor. With an effort, I re-focus them on Doctor Watson. And now I'm suddenly looking at someone else entirely - not just an admiring bystander, but a medical professional who clearly knows his own job. And even more importantly, one whom Sherlock seems to trust to know it, too, and whose professional opinion he obviously values.

I have no idea where exactly to place this Doctor Watson within Sherlock's universe, but at the moment, he seems to be taking centre stage. And of course, _of course_ that'sthe explanation why Sherlock came along so readily today when I asked him, in spite of everything. Which means that I'm being used. Again. But that's practically a tradition between us by now, isn't it? And admittedly, this time I can barely bring myself to mind. If that’s what it takes -

But just then, Sherlock departs from the house in Lauriston Gardens like so many times before, already ten steps ahead of us and completely unwilling to wait for us to catch up. And he leaves Doctor Watson behind, too.

I spot the man standing with Sally by the boundary tape outside the house when I look out of the door. I'm too far away to catch their words, but by their body language, it's not he who's asking her questions, it's she who's keeping him back while he's actually itching to be off. And whatever it is she's telling him right now, it can't be anything helpful.

Because whatever this man's role is – therapist? hired expert? _friend?_ \- it looks like he can work miracles. And if he can, then we'd be idiots to push him away.

“Donovan!” I thunder when Sally goes on and on.

“Coming!” she calls back immediately with deeply ingrained discipline, and starts walking towards me. After a few steps, however, she turns back to Doctor Watson.

“Stay away from Sherlock Holmes!” she calls to him, and I don't need convincing that that's sound advice to almost everyone on this planet. But I can't help feeling that this man may just be the exception that confirms the rule.

The next hour is taken up by a frantic but fruitless search of the house and its immediate surroundings for a pink suitcase. Then we have to acknowledge that it isn't there anymore.  
  
“If it ever existed,” Sally says.

“I think we know better than to doubt that,” I reply.

“Then there's only one explanation,” she concludes.

I so wish she weren’t right.

\+ + +

Well, if January 30th 2010 is to go down in history as the day of second chances, we might as well do it properly.

What I’ve just received from him is an invitation, of course. He’s thrown down the gauntlet, and it’s up to me to accept the challenge and pick it up.

It’s not an option to let it lie, to let it go, to just let him carry on laughing in our faces, in the face of the law. It doesn’t even need a memory of Sally Donovan’s voice raised in disdain - _spineless pushover_ were her words, weren’t they? - to dismiss that possibility. But then again, look what happened the last time I decided that he was in for a little piece of disciplinary action.

It’s a very tricky puzzle he’s set me there, but after a bit of deliberation, I know what to do. If he wants this, too, to be a game, then we’ll make it a game. We're playing for high stakes, of course, and this time it's not clear at all who will come out of it with a bloody nose. But I’ve got nothing to lose anymore, and everything to gain. And I’ve still got a promise to keep, haven't I?

So not two hours later, just as I said I would, I've got him across a coffee table with his trousers down again, and this time I do bring my whole team to watch.

”What are you doing?” he hisses when he enters his new flat, with Doctor Watson in tow again, and finds us going through his possessions. His voice is low but tight with anger. He seems genuinely surprised to see us here, too. Is that a compliment, or should I be worried?

“Well, I knew you’d find the case. I’m not stupid.”

“You can’t just break into my flat!”

“And you can’t withhold evidence. And I didn’t break into your flat.”

“Well, what do you call this then?”

I look around at my officers, then give him a mock-innocent little smirk. “It’s a drugs bust.”

I watch him closely for his reaction, but Doctor Watson beats him to it, and everyone’s focus - including mine - immediately shifts to him.

“Seriously?” he asks with an incredulous little laugh. “This guy, a junkie? Have you met him?”

Is he really as naïve as he looks?

“I’m pretty sure you could search this flat all day,” he continues, unabashed. “You wouldn’t find anything you could call recreational.”

I watch the two of them clearing the air on that issue with less than ten words each, which is truly remarkable. I also learn that they're already on first name terms.

Doctor John Watson continues to puzzle me. Naïve or not – the man brings something new, and something very unusual, to this show. He’s impressively defensive of his new friend. And Sherlock is very concerned with making a good impression on him, which is a first, too. I've rarely seen him so... tame.

That stops, of course, when he changes the subject, and rounds on Anderson and then Sally for messing up his kitchen. But even then, he sounds more like a kid on the verge of tears because someone's stolen his favourite teddy bear than a grown man facing down an unjust accusation.

“Put those back!” he demands when Sally confronts him with the nauseating contents of a glass jar, but the way his voice almost breaks on the words makes it sound more like a sob than an order. I'm almost beginning to worry that I've overdone it again.

“You could help us properly, and I'll stand them down,” I offer him a way to cut this short, rising from my seat.

“This is childish!” he hisses.

“Well, I'm dealing with a child.” And how could _I_ ever have forgotten that in the first place? “Sherlock, this is our case,” I take refuge in stating the obvious, before he can make me feel even worse. “I’m letting you in, but you do not go off on your own. Clear?”

He glares at me. “Oh, what, so – so - so you set up a pretend drugs bust to bully me?”

Jesus, I've never heard him stutter before, either.

“It stops being pretend if they find anything,” I assure him.

“I am clean!” he declares to the world at large, his voice raised indignantly, but I'm not letting him off the hook just yet. After all, I've got something to make good for on this particular topic, too.

“Is your flat? All of it?”

“I don’t even smoke!”

In a gesture that's more angry than triumphant, he unbuttons the cuff of his shirt and pulls it up, revealing a nicotine patch on his bare forearm.

“Neither do I.” I pull up the sleeve of my own shirt, and that settles the issue.

I think we can call it a draw.

\+ + +

I'd also think that a draw is the closest we'll ever get to a victory, with him. But Sally is not content. She's massively pissed off with me for going behind her back and letting him into the house in Brixton at all, and she's not satisfied yet.

“He bloody left again!” she calls out in frustration when he's sped off in a cab on God knows what new burst of inspiration. “We’re wasting our time!” And when I'm not ready to let go yet even then - “You know, he’s just a lunatic, and he’ll always let you down, and you’re wasting your time. All our time.”

We glare at each other for a long moment.

In her dark eyes, there is all the concentrated pain that I’ve caused her lately - all the extra strain I’ve put her under, all the times _I’ve_ let her down and stood by with my hands in my pockets.

Haven’t I just put my foot down? Made him toe the line, and brought everyone he’s ever insulted and antagonised along to witness it, just to make sure the message really stuck? But of course it isn't enough, if I’m really going to let him invalidate it again straight away. So am I really going to let him take the lead now again, and stumble after him like a fool, incapable as always of keeping up, literally and figuratively?

No. Because if I do, then I truly am past saving.

I sigh. “Okay, everybody,” I call it quits. “Done here.”

\+ + +

I'm the last one to leave, with everybody else already on the way down, when I stop to address John Watson.

“Why did he do that?” I ask, as if I truly expect him to have an answer. “Why did he have to leave?”

He shrugs. “You know him better than I do.”

“I’ve known him for five years and no, I don’t.” And truer word was never spoken.

“So why do you put up with him?”

The question comes as a surprise, and I have no reason whatsoever to tell a complete stranger the innermost secrets of my heart. But I do it anyway. Somehow, it's good to say it out loud at last.

“Because I’m desperate, that’s why.”

At the door, I turn back.

“And because Sherlock Holmes is a great man. And I think one day, if we’re very, very lucky, he might even be a good one.”

It's not just wishful thinking. It's an invitation to join a mission, from someone who no longer has the slightest idea how to go about it, to someone who just _might._

\+ + +

We’re almost back at NSY when John Watson, on the phone, turns me around and makes me head straight out again at top speed, with the destination Robert Kerr Further Education College, and with a very quiet Sally Donovan next to me. After a formal call for reinforcements that she made on my request, she’s fallen silent. Her eyes are on her phone, where she’s got a browser window open, and she seems absorbed in her reading.

Just then, my own phone pings a text alert. It’s on the dashboard, and I nod at her to pick it up.

She looks – no, _stares_ – at the screen in shocked silence.

I can feel my stomach tie itself into a knot. “What is it, Sally?”

When she speaks, her voice is strangely high-pitched, as if on the verge of hysterical laughter. “Italian or Chinese for dinner?”

“What?”

“It says, 'Italian or Chinese for dinner?'” she clarifies, and I almost break out laughing myself. Cathy doesn't usually sign her messages, but of course my phone is making no secret of the fact that it comes from her.

“Italian,” I say in a would-be casual tone. “Spaghetti Carbonara, and a bottle of Chianti. Not before midnight, though. Busy saving an idiot’s life right now. Can you type that for me?”

She seems to take a while to find her voice again, while I drive on.

“Two idiots,” she says at length.

“What?”

“Two idiots.” She holds up her own phone. “Not just a doctor. A soldier, too. RAMC. Invalided home from Afghanistan after getting shot in the leg. Hence the limp. Just out of therapy, too, by the sound of it. And they really met only yesterday.”

“ _What?”_

“He’s got a blog.”

“Oh.”

There is another long silence.

“You could have told me,” she says then, very quietly.

“I had no idea who he was.”

She rolls her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“Would you have believed me?” It's an apology, not an accusation, and I take great care to make that clear in the tone of my voice.

I can't do more than glance at her quickly to see how it's received, before I have to focus on the road again. She's got her face turned away from me to look out of her window. But there's no mistaking the deep blush on it, even in the fretwork of lights and shadow as we pass through the nightly streets of the city.

“I've always hated it in Traffic,” she says at long last.

\+ + +

It's a quiet man, too, that I find sitting on the back steps of an ambulance ten minutes later. Well, quiet is relative, of course. But denying being in shock is of course one of its surest symptoms. Something must have happened here while we were rushing towards it, something more than a bullet whistling too closely past Sherlock’s head for comfort. But of course he’s not going to elaborate.

“So, the shooter,” he changes the subject quickly. “No sign?”

“Cleared off before we got here,” I say, humouring him for the moment. “But a guy like that would've had enemies, I suppose. One of them could have been following him, but...” I shrug. “Got nothing to go on.”

He gives me a pointed look. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

I roll my eyes. “Okay, gimme.”

He gets to his feet. “The bullet they just dug out of the wall’s from a hand gun. Kill shot over that distance from that kind of a weapon – that’s a crack shot you’re looking for, but not just a marksman; a fighter. His hands couldn’t have shaken at all, so clearly he’s acclimatised to violence. He didn’t fire until I was in immediate danger, though, so strong moral principle. You’re looking for a man probably with a history of military service... “ He glances around, as if for inspiration. “... nerves of steel...”

He trails off then, stopped short in his tracks by something that I can't see. Except I can, when I follow his gaze. And sure as hell, there he is, Doctor John Watson, RAMC, standing just outside the taped-off area with an air of angelic innocence and an expression of complete unconcern on his face.

I know a little thing or two about guilty secrets by now. And considering what Sally told me in the car, this one really doesn’t need deductive genius to uncover.

The implications should be highly worrying. But somehow, what I've just learned is more reassuring than anything. I barely listen to Sherlock's rather touching attempts at undoing his blunder, and deflecting attention from the fact that this quiet, unassuming bloke has just killed to save the life of a man he barely knows. It's not bad news, that. Not at all. It means that if there is any man on earth who can handle Sherlock Holmes, it's this one.

_He's with me._

And I for one will sleep more soundly from now on, knowing that.

„Okay. We’ll bring you in tomorrow," I dismiss him. "Off you go."

But it’s really me who’s being dismissed, I realise as I’m watching him go to join John Watson outside the boundary of the police tape. Without the need for further words, he’s dismissed me from a responsibility that I’ve never wanted, that I've never felt equal to, and that I've spectacularly failed to live up to when it would have mattered most.

It's such a relief, it makes me smile.

People say that the darkest hour of the night is always the one just before dawn. I agree.

He will never know it, but when John Watson stepped into Sherlock's life, he saved so much more than himself.

 

THE END

 

**Author's Note:**

> As I see it, the great challenge when writing a Sherstrade story – for those who care about these things, anyway – is always how to fit it into the canonical framework of the original show. So instead of setting the story in the pre-canon past, or in the far future, I thought I'd try and pencil it right in between the lines of the actual show. If that means you'll never be able to look at “A Study in Pink” with the same eyes again now, I apologise. A bit. Maybe. ;)
> 
> The other great challenge – again, for those who care – is to get these two guys into bed together while still letting them be essentially themselves. Of course, it's always Greg who's hard to persuade. So what could possibly motivate this man, whom we know as an epitome of loyalty and decency, to forget himself so far as to sleep with his protégé, when he should really know better? Let me know whether I've woven a believable motivation for him here.
> 
> Many thanks to [Ariane_DeVere](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariane_DeVere/pseuds/Ariane_DeVere/works), whose invaluable [transcripts of the show](http://arianedevere.livejournal.com/36505.html) have proved endlessly helpful to me, particularly when writing the final two chapters. I've taken all the original words of dialogue from [her transcript of “A Study in Pink”](http://arianedevere.livejournal.com/43794.html). 
> 
> And although she will hate to see her name mentioned in connection with a story like this, I also have to thank [Jolie_Black](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Jolie_Black/pseuds/Jolie_Black), whose epic story about pre-canon Sherlock and Greg, ["Aiding and Abetting"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3738400/chapters/8287450), made me fall in love with writing Sherlock from Greg Lestrade's POV. I've shamelessly stolen that narrative perspective from her. 
> 
> Thank you also to all who have read, kudo’d and commented. Your feedback means so much! :)


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